First Review - Alice Munro
DEAR LIFE
By Alice Munro
It’s said that the American novelist Hunter S. Thompson typed out, not only all of The Great Gatsby, but also A Farewell to Arms (or a few pages of each, dependent on who you believe). He wanted to understand how it felt to write a great book, and, no doubt, he was hoping to take away some style pointers in the process. These days, we might call that practice, to read as a writer – without the heavy finger work.
I’m ashamed to admit that Dear Life, by Alice Munro, is the first short story collection of hers that I’ve read. I don’t know why it took me so long. Munro’s work has been compiled and published fourteen times and she’s been included in countless anthologies. She won both the Man Booker and a Nobel Prize in Literature, in addition to a swag of International and Canadian awards. (She is Canadian by birth.) This week, in an effort to understand how Munro’s seemingly simple stories invited such deep emotional recognition, and accolades from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzan, I decided to follow Thompson’s example. What was Munro doing? With a few typed out pages could I begin to understand and embody her writing spirit? (haha)
I’d finished Dear Life pretty quickly. And then sat, thought about what it is she does. A LOT. Her work had evoked a profound response in me. What she said about the world was sad and funny and shocking, terrible regrettable, but also dreadfully true. Her characters and their situations, always ordinary, aroused intense sympathy. What was it about the night policeman that made me care? Why was I compelled to turn the pages to discover the fate of the shy spinster teaching in the sanatorium?
Writing in The Guardian in 2009, Liz Allardice says: Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness – and joy – of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro. She writes so directly, so honestly (sometimes shockingly so) about "ordinary life", which is, of course, anything but, that it is easy to overlook how extraordinary her stories are. But it is impossible to ignore the bolt of recognition, the sense that she is revealing almost unspeakable intimacies just to you.
What I noticed right off was the voice. Confidential in tone, omniscient, conversational whether it was narrating in first or close third, you were told a story by someone who held wisdom beyond their years. Take some of these opening lines as examples:
In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town…
Some people get everything wrong…
All this happened in the seventies…
So, although the characters, plot and setting differed to various degrees, the voice, you might say, sounded the same. And perhaps the reason I’d let myself go as a reader and invested in the people populating Munro’s world, opening myself to respond, was because I trusted this narrator? With their oh so absorbing voice? And might the same voice also drive me through each story? And was it this voice, that reassured me right now, when the world seemed to be growing a little stranger?
Another notable aspect of Dear Life is, of course, setting. The places are cold, even freezing, usually isolated and it often snows. We are witness to small town life, rural life, intimate family life and all of it drawn with excruciating eye for detail.
…Between the cars there was a short walkway where you were actually walking over the place where the cars joined up. There you could feel the train’s motion in a sudden and alarming way. A heavy door behind you and another in front, an on either side of the walkway clanging metal plates… You always hurried through these passages, where the banging and the swaying reminded you how things were put together in a way that seemed not so inevitable after all. Almost casual, yet in too much of a hurry, that banging and swaying.
The door at the end was heavy even for Greta. Or she was drained by fear. She pushed mightily with her shoulder.
And there, between the cars, on one of those continually noisy sheets of metal – there sat Katy…
I was immediately reminded of a time I’d lost my son in a crowded shopping mall. He was two or three years old. The panic. The realising horror. And the meme I’d read earlier in the week, from Australian writer Kate Forsyth: I’m always searching for the single, telling detail that makes me feel something… a little shiver…
Yes.
I recommend you read this collection of short stories. Or, I imagine any of her books (I have thirteen now to go. TBR pile tottering at this stage). She is a special kind of writer. And I’m so pleased I finally discovered her.