"Dear Life" by Alice Munro (Chatto and Windus, 2012)

• In "To Reach Japan" a wife of a engineer is a bit of a poet. On a long train trip she's unfaithful, leaving her daughter asleep. When she returns, the daughter's gone, but not far. Then at the station she meets a man, a poet she's met before. Her daughter lets go of her hand.
• "Amundsen" begins on a train. A women takes up a teaching post in a TB hospital in a little place called Amundsen. The doctor, Alister, takes her to bed on their 2nd evening together. A surprize. He promises to marry her. Later, he's driving to their secret wedding. They're parked outside a shop. The driver of the truck in front of them raps on their window.

  Alister is surprized - if he had not been talking so earnestly he would have noticed the problem. He rolls down the window and the man asks if we are parked there because we intend to buy something in the store. If not, could we please move along? "Just leaving," says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me. (p.61)

  Only later are we told about the nature of the discussion. The page-long section at the end jumps years to show when they meet again by chance in a crowded street, walking in opposite directions. The story ends

  It still seemed as if we could make our way out of that crowd, that in a moment we would be together. But just as certain that we would carry on in the way we were going. And so we did. No breathless cry, no hand on my shoulder when I reached the sidewalk. Just that flash, that I had seen in an instant, when one of his eyes opened wider. It was the left eye, always the left, as I remembered. And it always looked so strange, alert and wondering, as some whole impossibility had occurred to him, one that almost made him laugh. For me, it was the same as when I left Amundsen, the train dragging me still dazed and full of disbelief. Nothing changes really about love. (p.66)

  Rather as in the first story, a child (this time Mary, who's befriended the woman) reveals something about the adults - Mary said that the doctor had "one eye crooked to the other".
• In "Leaving Maverley" a quiet girl suddenly disappears. Turns out she run off to marry the minister's jazz-playing son, though they only met once. At the end, four years later, we find out how she's been doing.
• "Gravel" has a child narrator whose older sister drowns trying to save their dog. Their mother had left her insurance agent father to start a new live with someone from the theatre. At the moment in the narration when the drowning happens, the style changes

  After a while, I realized I was being given instructions. I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something. That the dog had fallen into the water. The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she'd be drowned. Blitzee. Drowned. Drowned. But Blitzee wasn't in the water. She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her. I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn't, you haven't, it could happen but it hasn't. (p.102)

  Years later, in the final 2.5 pages, the narrator meets the man her mother ran off with. He says "Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway" (p.109)

4 stories. 4 women leaving boring security to try a new lifestyle. Each story has a sudden change in narrative style (a change in pace, the amount of introspection, or of detail) at a crucial moment. Often there's a coda.

• "Haven" ends with a funeral. There are power-plays within families, examples of how women try to exert control - "Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous" (p.128)
• "Pride" has a deformed man not wanting a once-rich woman to move in with him. At the end they're looking into his backyard

  It was full of birds. Black-and-white, dashing up a storm. Not birds. Something larger than robins, smaller than crows. She said, "Skunks. Little skunks. More white in them than black." But how beautiful. Flashing and dancing and never getting in each other's way, so you could not tell how many there were, where each body started or stopped. While we watched, they lifted themselves up one by one and left the water and proceeded to walk across the yard, swiftly but in a straight diagonal line. As if they were proud of themselves but discreet. Five of them. (p.153)

• In "Corrie", when a long-term blackmailer dies, the husband and mistress involved don't feel as they expected. I didn't really get it.
• "Train" is the longest piece - 40 pages - and maybe my favourite. A man walks out of one life into another. Then again.
• "In Sight of the Lake" a woman drives to a village, becomes rather confused. At the end we discover that it's all a dream/recollection by an old lady in care.
• "Dolly" begins with 2 people in a suicide pact, driving, wondering whether to leave a note. Later we learn about how a woman with a broken car once affected their relationship, a note involved again.

Before the last 4 stories is a short note that will frequently be quoted

Finale - The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life

The 4 pieces share some descriptions (of how the door was locked, for example), assess the difference between reality and how the events would be treated in fiction, and a puzzlement about how events weren't questioned or probed at the time.

• A child's taken to see the dead body of a favourite maid in "The Eye". She believes for years that she saw the corpse's eye twitch, knowing it couldn't be true.
• In "Night" a young girl who shares a room with her younger sister has insomnia, begins to imagine harming her sister. She starts walking outside. One night she meets her father (who'd probably been waiting for her). His relaxed attitude puts her mind at rest.
• In "Voices" a girl accompanies her mother to a dance, sees people there who give her ideas about sex
• "Dear Life" - more about a mother who wanted to be upwardly mobile, but got Parkinson's, and a father who was more popular, more content. On the final page the narrator says "I did not go home for my mother's last illness or for her funeral", which may help explain the number of funerals in this book.

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (Observer)
• Christian Lorentzen (LRB) ('her reputation is like a good address.’ It’s an address I wouldn’t want to move to, and I didn’t enjoy my recent visit. But the impulse to say that makes me wonder whether I’m some sort of big city chauvinist, or a misogynist, or autistic, or a decadent reader deaf to the charms of simple sentences, perfectly polished ... Munro’s stories suffer when they’re collected because the right way to read them is in a magazine ... Munro started out as an epiphany-monger. ... the slow way the stories make their single-minded march towards precious (if a bit obvious) epiphanies is a relief from Munro’s later tendency to heap on details for details’ sake and load up her stories with false leads. ... Munro’s most trusted story-generating procedure: Rose observes something, then experiences something else herself, and years later another thing happens that connects the two incidents and imbues them with meaning. ... A widespread yearning [] a time of more innocence and more shame – a yearning to be repressed – seems to explain a lot about Munro’s popularity and acclaim)
• Ruth Scurr (Dairy Telegraph
• Jesse Kornbluth (Huffington Post)
• quill and quire (By actively suppressing so many chronological and biographical markers, these new works capture qualities of memory and consciousness that, in Munro’s earlier stories, were embedded in larger, detailed narratives)
• Anne Enright (The Guardian)

"The Moons of Jupiter" by Alice Munro (Vintage, 2004)

It was first published in 1986. It has an Introduction where she says -

• "I can't see that travel ever has much effect on me, as a writer", p.xv
• "The stories that are personal are carried inexorably away from the real. And the observed stories lose their anecdotal edges, being invaded by familiar shapes and voices. // So one hopes, anyway", p.xiv

On the back cover, Anne Tyler writes "Only a few writers continue to create these full-bodied miniature universes of the old school".

In "Connection" the first part sets up the conflict between the narrator and her husband. Her husband starts pointing out the grammatical errors of her aunt, who'd just left. Then there's a moment when something erupts - "He was still talking as I threw the Pyrex plate at his head" (p.17) -

In "Dulse" there's repetition of a type that I've not seen before in Munro - "She had noticed something about herself, on this trip to the Maritimes ... she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become another, and she had noticed it on the trip"

In "Accident" the narrator briefly breaks in to tell us "It is in imagining her affair to be a secret that Frances shows, most clearly, a lack of small-town instincts".

In "Labour Day Dinner" there's a big cast. We're even told ages - Angela 17, Eva 12, Ruth 25, David 21. There's some parallel subtext, which I don't recall seeing a lot elsewhere in Munro

"A gibbous moon." It was Roberta who told George what a gibbous moon was, and so his saying this is always an offering. It is an offering now, as they drive between the black cornfields. "So there is." Roberta doesn't reject the offering with silence, but she doesn't welcome it, either. She is polite. She yawns, and there is a private sound to her yawn. This isn't tactics, though she knows indifference is attractive. The real thing is. He can spot an imitation; he can always withstand tactics

There's often a jump before the final section of stories. In "The Turkey Season" it's marked by "I have a picture of the Turkey Barn crew taken on Christmas Eve". Near the end of "Accident" we get "nearly thirty years later" and "This will go on for a while".

"The Moons of Jupiter" and "The Bardon Bus" remain my favorites, with "The Accident" coming third.

"Selected Stories" by Alice Munro (Random House, 1986)

These stories pre-date previous books of hers that I've read. Some of them are only 10 pages long! In the first story, a father, on a car trip in the 1930s with his 2 young kids, drops in on an old girlfriend. On the way home "My father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from the thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the licorice, that there are things not to be mentioned". The daughter's PoV has to be broken out of in the penultimate paragraph

So my father drives and my brother watches the road or rabbits and I feel my father's life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back it turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine

(After posting this write-up I read "Alice Munro" by Coral Ann Howells which quotes this very paragraph on page 1, writing Where but in Munro would we find a sentence like this ... This description by a young girl of the imaginative process of transformation from 'touchable' into 'mysterious' might also be taken as Munro's description of her quality of vision and of her fictional method of mapping alternative worlds)

In "Images" a father and child go out.

Then we went along the river, the Wawanash River, which was high, running full, silver in the middle where the sun hit it, and where it arrowed in to its swiftest motion. That is the current, I thought, and I pictures the current as something separate from the water, just as the wind was separate from the air and had its own invading shape." (p.45).

They meet someone living rough. The father says "But don't say anything about it at home. Don't mention it to your momma or Mary, either one". At times in other stories the pace hastens -

Arthur got up in the evenings and sat in his dressing gown. Blaikie Noble came to visit. He said his room at the hotel above the kitchen, they were trying to steam-cook him. It made him appreciate the cool of the porch. They played the games that Arthur loved, school-teacher's games. They played a geography game, and they tried to see who could make the most words out of the name Beethoven. Arthur won. He got thirty-four. He was immensely delighted. (p.52)

"The Ottawa Valley" begins promisingly -

I think of my mother sometimes in department stores. I don't know why, I was never in one with her; their plenitude, their sober bustle, it seems to me, would have satisfied her. I think of her of course when I see somebody on the street who has Parkinson's disease, and more and more often lately when I look in the mirror. Also in Union Station, Toronto, because the first time I was there I was with her, and my little sister. It was one summer during the War, we waited between trains; we were going home with her, with my mother, to her old home in Ottawa Valley."

I like the mix of information and promise. The rest of the story's pretty good too. After that I struggled for a few stories, so I jumped to "The Moons of Jupiter". Here's the first paragraph.

I found my father in the heart wing, on the eighth floor of Toronto General Hospital. He was in a semi-private room. The other bed was empty. He said that his hospital insurance covered only a bed in the ward, and he was worried that he might be charged extra.

Distraction in times of crisis runs in the family

I was … irritated by an article I had been reading in a magazine in the waiting room. It was about another writer, a woman younger, better-looking, probably more talented than I am (p.206)

Later we find out about one of her daughters

"Where's Nicola?" I said, thinking an once of an accident or an overdose. Nichola is my older daughter. She used to be a student at the Conservatory, then she became a cocktail waitress, then she was out of work. If she had been at the airport, I would probably have said something wrong. I would have asked her what her plans were, and she would have gracefully brushed back her hair and said, "Plans?" - as if that was a word I had invented (p.208)

It's decided that her father needs a sudden operation. She leaves him, saying "I'll see you when you come out of the anaesthetic". The final paragraphs are a flashback to a few hours before when she was walking in the park, seeing someone who reminded her of Nichola. Themes and symbols are brought together.

If I did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided. I felt like one of those people who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death. A relief, while it lasts. My father had chosen and Nichola had chosen. Someday, probably soon, I would hear from her, but it came to the same thing. I meant to get up and go over to the tomb, to look at the relief carvings, the stone pictures, that go all the way around it. I always mean to look at them and I never do. Not this time, either. It was getting cold out, so I went inside to have a coffee and something to eat before I went back to the hospital.

I liked the story. More generally I like Munro's stories when the characters are opinionated, not evasive. I don't like it when a significant detail is withheld by the narrator so that we can be surprised later. Having read about a third of the stories in this book I think it's time to take a break. I'm not very good at seeing behind facades.

Other reviews

• Wendy Smith
• John Updike (New York Times)

"Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage" by Alice Munro (Vintage, 2002)

Interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch in The Paris Review she said

• "Well I think that "Jack Randa Hotel," which I quite like, works as an entertainment. I want it to, anyway. Although a story like "Friend of my Youth" does not work as an entertainment. It works in some other way. It works at my deepest level."
• "I didn’t last at [my first creative writing] job at all. I hated it, and even though I had no money, I quit. ... It was terrible. This was 1973. York was one of the more radical Canadian universities, yet my class was all male except for one girl who hardly got to speak. They were doing what was fashionable at the time, which had to do with being both incomprehensible and trite; they seemed intolerant of anything else."

I don't like usually like long, entertaining stories, and I suspect I sometimes like supposedly "incomprehensible and trite" pieces. On e-notes they say

• "In Munro's works the mundane is juxtaposed with the fantastic, and she often relies on paradox and irony to expose meanings that lie beneath the surface of commonplace occurrences."
• "Many critics echo the sentiments of Catherine Sheldrick who states that the stories of Alice Munro present "ordinary experiences so that they appear extraordinary, invested with a kind of magic." It is this emphasis on the seemingly mundane progression of female lives that prompted Ted Solataroff to call Munro a 'great stylist of 1920's realism, a Katherine Anne Porter brought up to date.'"
• "Occasionally faulted for limiting herself to a narrow thematic range, Munro is, nevertheless, widely regarded as a gifted short story writer whose strength lies in her ability to present the texture of everyday life with both compassion and unyielding precision."

I've now read 2 books of hers, and some stories in anthologies. I've seen little of the fantastic, quite a lot of irony. There's a high body-count (though death is an "ordinary experience" I suppose). Compassion? Yes. Precision? Not sure. Some effects are only possible if many words are used - I think Proust's work exhibits that type of effect, with precision. In places Munro's work requires a similar patience on behalf of the reader. I'm still coming to terms with the stamina required. On p.224 for example there's this paragraph (part of a 24 page story) - "She looked down at the table napkins, which were folded in quarters. They were not as big as dinner napkins or as small as cocktail napkins. They were set in overlapping rows so that a corner of each napkin (the corner embroidered with a tiny blue or pink or yellow flower) overlapped the folded corner of its neighbor. No two napkins embroidered with the same color of flower were touching each other. Nobody had disturbed them, or if they had - for she did see a few people around the room holding napkins - they had picked up napkins from the end of the row in a careful way and this order had been maintained". This is Meriel attending a post-funeral buffet at the parents of the dead boy. It says something about the guests and whoever set the table but we hear nothing more of them, and in any case it's rather verbose. It tells us something about Meriel's state of mind (later that day sleeps with a stranger). It slows the pace. Maybe that's the point.

The title story of this book is 50+ pages long. 6 characters have a voice, one of them a shopkeeper who could have been chopped were space at a premium.

In "Floating Bridge", Jinny, 42, is being told a rude joke by a stranger when we learn that she's been recently told that her cancer's in remission. A boy who may know about her illness drives her home, shows her some Nature on the way, then kisses her. I guess the title has a symbolic significance.

I think I've read "Family Furniture" before. The title story also features a pile of furniture. We see the narrator's changing attitude to Alfrida, a rather larger-than-life character. The narrator used details about Alfrida (who she didn't much like) in a story. The narrator has views about men

• "[In] my aunts' houses ... too, you could come upon a shabby male hideaway with its furtive yet insistent odors, its shamefaced but stubborn look of contradicting the female domain", p.105
• "All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. The only observation I had made of couples was of my aunts and uncles and of my mother and father, and those husbands and wives seemed to have remote and formalized connections and no obvious dependence on each other", p.107
• "in my experience ... Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn't want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.", p.110

Later the narrator says "I had ended my marriage for personal - this is, wanton - reasons". Much later we learn more about the men (the narrator's father included) who Alfrida befriended.

Powerplays/conventions between the sexes and highlighting of gendered social roles feature in several stories.

• "Well, of course he was wrong. Men are not normal, Chrissy. That's one thing you'll learn if you ever get married.", p.263
• "It was the women who kept the conversation afloat. Men seemed cowed by the situation.", p.297

In "Comfort", Nina returns home to find that her terminally ill husband, Lewis, had killed himself as she knew he'd intended. She looks for a suicide note, has trouble making the appropriate arrangements. In a flashback we hear of Lewis's problems with Creationists in his classroom.

In "Nettle" a woman leaves her family to write (and have a non-committal affair). She meets by chance a childhood heart-throb.

I didn't get much from "Post and Beam". "What Is Remembered" interested me more. Muriel sleeps with a stranger - unplanned, just once. In the thirty years that her marriage continued, she thinks back to that episode, the ferry how nuances of phrasing changed the atmosphere, how "Take me somewhere else" meant more than "Let's go somewhere else", new memories and realisations strike her.

"Queenie" is in unnumbered sections sometimes as short as half a page. A women stays with her step-sister (who left at 18 to live with a music teacher) and sees that the relationship's unpleasant. Later the step-sister leaves again and the sisters lose contact.

"The Bear Came Over the Mountain" is another story where the first paragraph gives the reader lots of detail. We follow the course of Fiona's dementia. In a care home she forms an attachment with the wheelchaired Aubrey. Fiona goes downhill when Aubrey goes back home. Grant, Fiona's husband, visits Aubrey's home to ask his wife if Aubrey could visit Fiona - ironic because over the years Grant's had many affairs. The wife refuses, but later phones Grant asking about a date. Grant doesn't reply immediately. He visits Fiona, asking if she recalls Aubrey. She doesn't. Her health's improved.

Repeated details include flat-chested women, tall women, "house, not an apartment", and suicides. She leaves gaps of decades, begins with a fragment.

Some details from the stories are repeated in the Paris Review interview

• On p.101 it says "At the end of my second year I was leaving college - my scholarship had covered only two years there. It didn't matter - I was planning to be a writer anyway. And I was getting married.. In the Paris Review interview she says "[I was a serious writer by the time [I] went to college ... I knew I would only be at university two years because the scholarships available at that time lasted only two years. ...I got married right after the second year. I was twenty."
• On p.158 it says "my father shot and butchered the horses that were fed to the foxes and mink. In the Paris Review interview she says "When my father died, he was still living in that house on the farm, which was a fox and mink farm"

Other reviews

• Bob Williams
• Michelle Huneven
• Bronwyn Drainie
• Jose Carlo C. Flordeliza
• Benjamin Markovits

"The love of a good woman" by Alice Munro (Vintage, 1998)

I've never read an Alice Munro book before, though I've liked "The Barton Bus" for a while. This book starts with the title story, a novella (77 pages). 3 boys find a dead body in the river. When they go home for a meal they don't mention it at first. We're told how their behaviour in the country differs from how they behave in the town, and it's different again from what they're like at home. We learn about their families in a domestic context

His five-year-old brother was sitting in place at the table, banging his knife and fork up and down and yelling, "Want some service. Want some service." He got that from their father, who did it for a joke. Bud passed by his brother's chair and said quietly, "Look. She's putting lumps in the mashed potatoes again." He had his brother convinced that lumps were something you added, like raisins to rice pudding, from a supply in the cupboard (p.18)

We meet Bud's image-conscious sisters, Cece's violent father, and Jimmy's crippled father, seeing how some of them are different when they're out of the house.

Years pass. We're at the deathbed of an angrily-dying woman 27 years old. We discover that appearances are more deceptive than they initially appeared.

Image creation is something that's on the mind of several characters in this book. In a later story, "Save the Reaper" a 7 year-old "looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.
What did it mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future" (p.180)

In "Cortes Island" the main character thinks about becoming a writer - " I brought a school notebook and tried to write - did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left ... I was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week"

I like "Save the Reaper". The persona uses "temporarily in abeyance" on p.148, which doesn't sound right though. We don't learn for a while the relationship between Eve and Sophie, whereas the next story tells all right from the start "Thirty years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband's parents." I like "The Children Stay" too.

In "Before the Change" Madeleine goes back to her father's house having split with her fiancé, who teaches at a Theological College. She split because her fiancé wanted her to have an abortion rather than a too-early child. She's given it away for adoption. The style's epistlatory, though the letters are never sent. She realises that her father (a doctor) performs abortions - illegal in those days. He suddenly dies. In the will there's surprisingly little money left. She thinks maybe he did the abortions for free. Then, when the housekeeper comes to collect her stuff in a big car, she assumes blackmail. Although, she finally thinks What I've been shying away from is that it could have been done for love./ For love, then. Never rule that out."

"My Mother's Dream" is from the viewpoint of someone that's unborn, then a foetus, then a baby for most of the story. One night she might have died - "I think that the outcome was not certain and that will was involved. It was up to me, I mean, to go out way or another" (p.336). At the end, an adolescent watching silly kids play in a pool she says "I would have liked for one of them to see my pale pajamas moving in the dark, and to scream out in earnest, thinking that I was a ghost." (p.340)

Stories can share details

• "little laughs or barks, not to indicate that anything is funny but as a kind of punctuation", p.260
• "Her giggling was a kind of punctuation of speech", p.312

She uses interjected flashbacks, one-line memories, and often has more than 3 active characters. Families figure strongly. Years pass. There's a dislocation between events and the understanding of them. Epiphanies are delayed, muted, half-expected by the characters. Readers are sometimes kept in the dark about details that all (or most) of the characters know.

On his blog, Charles E. May says "As usual in a Munro work, the story covers a long period of time and focuses on several characters - the kind of time span and character configuration that makes many reviewers call her stories 'novelistic.' However, if we read ... as a short story rather than as a novel - that is, if we read it more than once - as a language-based thematic structure rather than for plot and character configuration - we may find that it is more complex than we first assume."

I'm not used to reading long stories. There were times when I wondered whether all the twists and turns were worth it -

She had thought he was older than she was, at least as old as Brian (who was thirty, though people were apt to say he didn't act it). but as soon as he started talking to her, in this offhand, dismissive way, never quite meeting her eyes, she suspected that he was younger than he'd like to appear. Now with that flush she was sure of it. As it turned out, he was a year younger than she was. Twenty-five.

In other places I wonder whether diminishing returns set in. On p.238 it takes 9 lines to get a suitcase from the top of a wardrobe. I noticed that one blogger on reading the title story wrote "By the end, that whole first thirty pages felt highly unnecessary", a feeling I had too.

Other reviews

• Sandy English
• Michael Gorra (New York Times)
• Reading Group Guide
• the random book review
• The Canadian Book Review ("The stories themselves are filled with Munro’s classic reserved style")