Bridgewater Review Volume 33 | Issue 1 Article 6 May-2014 Alice Munro: An Appreciation Michael Boyd Bridgewater State University, [email protected] Recommended Citation Boyd, Michael (2014). Alice Munro: An Appreciation. Bridgewater Review, 33(1), 12-14. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol33/iss1/6 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. It is difficult to see a significant con- Alice Munro: An Appreciation nection between this beginning and the story that follows, but we may treat Michael Boyd it as a piece of self-analysis. Munro hen a student in one of my English classes seems to be announcing something important about her own practice as a exclaimed how neat it was that we just storyteller. She characteristically puts in happened to be reading some stories “too many things going on at the same W time,” things that we will be forced by Alice Munro on the day it was announced that to accommodate by making our own she had won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, I connections. These complications are didn’t mention that I had predicted that this would probably the primary reason her readers frequently claim that her short stories happen every year for at least a seem more like novels. decade. Why spoil the student’s This claim is obviously presented as enjoyment of coincidence? Or, praise—and perhaps explains why she even better, the illusion that I finally received the Prize, long overdue, making her one of the oldest recipients might have insider knowledge? at the age of 82 and the only one who Her winning was not inevitable, writes only short stories, not novels. (Yes, I know that The Lives of Girls and after all. The fact that she was Women [1971], is always called a novel, a woman from a small town in but The Beggar Maid, published seven Ontario who wrote only short years later, is always referred to as a short-story cycle, in spite of the fact that stories, not novels, did not necessarily make her an it follows the same pattern of interre- obvious front-runner. Only her work would do that— lated stories as the earlier work. In any case, her work has done much to elevate the 14 books published over the past 45 years. Alice the status of short fiction in the minds Munro should be seen as both continuing the realist/ of critics and common readers.) Chekhovian tradition and introducing innovations in She writes primarily but not exclusively technique that have been admired by readers and of the lives of girls and women in this expanded or dilated manner, giving writers all over the world. Her central same time; also too many people. us the illusion of seeing a whole life, setting, the small towns and farms of Think, he told her. What is the not just the singular epiphany of the southwestern Ontario, has become important thing? What do you moment of self-discovery that has been as richly populated with vivid fic- want us to pay attention to? Think. the defining characteristic of the short tional characters as Hardy’s Wessex, story, at least since James Joyce. How is Eventually she wrote a story that Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, or Garcia this accomplished? Not by adding more was about her grandfather kill- Marquez’s Macondo. words—although many of her best ing chickens, and the instructor stories are longer than average, some When teaching the stories of Alice seemed pleased with it. Georgia rightfully considered novellas. More Munro, I like to begin with the open- herself thought it was a fake. She significantly, she employs a variety ing of one entitled “Differently” from made a long list of things that had of devices to create the sense of a life her collection Friend of My Youth (1990): been left out and handed it in as an extended through time. appendix to the story. The instruc- Georgia once took a creative-writ- tor said that she expected too Surely the most frequently employed of ing course, and what the instructor much, of herself and of the process, these devices is her rejection of linear told her was: Too many things. and that she was wearing him out chronology in favor of time-shifts, Too many things going on at the (Selected Stories, 498). often jumping backwards to fill in the past or leaping forward, shocking us 12 Bridgewater Review with the changes wrought by time. These shifts are clearly marked by Munro finally received the Nobel Munro’s segmentation of her text, triple-spacing between sections run- Prize for Literature … making ning from one to six or seven pages in her one of the oldest recipients length. Reading one of her stories for the first time, I am constantly aware of at the age of 82 and the only one how impossible it is to predict where in the central character’s life she is taking who writes only short stories, us next. Only when we reach the end of the story does the ordering of the dif- not novels. ferent parts seem essential to the effects created by the narrative as a whole. Another way in which Munro disrupts without them having any apparent not this doubt, this fear also refer to the and expands conventional storytelling connection. Readers may be left to reader’s uncertainty about how things practice is by splitting the story into dif- make their own thematic linkages. connect in this narrative? ferent points of view, something more A character might reflect on her frequently found in novels than in short For me, Munro’s most exciting experi- personal loss of past relationships. Her fiction. “Labor Day Dinner” presents ments in form or structure occur in risky decision to burn her bridges and the events of a single afternoon through the middle period of her writing, from seek a new life is suddenly thrown into the eyes of three characters, none 1980 to a little after the turn of the doubt: “Sometimes our connection is of whom have any idea of what will century, a period that includes seven frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost almost happen to them at the end of the collections—half of her production to lost. Views and streets deny knowledge story. “White Dump”combines shifts in date. In an interview with the CBC of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn’t we time with shifts in point of view to tell radio host Peter Gzowski in 1994, she rather have a destiny to submit to, then, the story of the breakup of a marriage offered a hint of what she was trying something that claims us, anything, through the eyes of three generations to do in some of her most ambitious instead of such flimsy choices, arbi- —daughter, mother, and grandmother. works: “I want to move away from trary days? (“Albanian Virgin,” Selected Sometimes the breaks seem more what happened, to the possibility of Stories 602). An interpretive leap is in radical, as in “The Albanian Virgin” this happening, or that happening, and order here. The existential crisis of the and “The Love of a Good Woman,” a kind of idea that life is not just made character can also be read as a dilemma when one story collides with another up of facts, things that happened … but in the reader-writer relationship. Might Michael Boyd’s Favorite Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, The View from Castle Rock (2006) Marriage (2001) Alice Munro Stories The View from Castle Rock Where to begin? Start with Open Hateship, etc. The Hired Girl Family Furnishings Secrets (1995) or maybe her excel- Too Much Happiness (2009) lent choice of 28 stories from the Comfort first seven collections, Selected Stories Nettles Dimensions (1997). My favorites (1998-2012) The Bear Came Over Fiction spread over six volumes are: the Mountain Some Women Child’s Play Runaway (2004) The Love of a Good Woman (1998) Wood Runaway Love of a Good Woman Dear Life (2012) Cortes Island Passion Save the Reaper Chance Leaving Maverley The Children Stay Soon Gravel My Mother’s Dream Silence Corrie May 2014 13 all the things that happen in fantasy, shameful. Laying your finger on the half the class and further complicate an the things that might have happened, wire to get the safe shock, feeling a bit already complex structure scheduled the kind of alternate life that can almost of what it’s like, then pulling back” for discussion on that day. But some- seem to be accompanying what we (392). But there is nothing especially times it can lead to a perception of her call our real lives. I wanted to get all unusual about such use of the imagina- body of work as an single, multifarious of that, sort of, working together.” tion to consider various possible lives, entity enriched by that repetition with Can we imagine what Georgia’s writ- what might have happened. We do it in the same sort of variation so essential to ing instructor would say about that? our lives, as a part of our real lives, and musical structure and the cohesiveness Suddenly nothing can be safely omitted! we do it when, in the act of reading, of novels. Resemblances between char- Alternate lives lived alongside of our we vicariously enter the lives of fic- acters, relationships, plot situations, and “real life”? We might recall Jorge Luis tional characters. themes abound. For example, Munro likes to return to the theme of marital infidelity—real and imagined—and its aftermath.