Alice Munro - Family Furnishings

IN 1971, ALICE MUNRO PUBLISHED HER SECOND BOOK, Lives of Girls and Women. Sometimes I read the title as an assertion of the importance of the lives of girls and women, and sometimes I read the title as a self-effacing acknowledgement, or even a warningthese are only the lives of girls and women; dont bother to read about them if you dont care. And in this paradox resides the literary career of a great writer who is simultaneously strange and down-to-earth, daring and straightforward. I cannot read any Alice Munro story without believing every word, as if Alice herself is inside the head of Sophia Kovalevsky (Too Much Happiness), or the head of a woman whose husband has murdered their three children (Dimensions), or the head of a man whose wife is institutionalized with dementia (The Bear Came over the Mountain). As a reader and as a writer, I embrace every phrase and every observation almost without being able to help myself, because every one seems as true as true and as involving as can be.

Munros style has always asked to be taken at face value. The Love of a Good Woman, the opening story of this collection of stories that Munro has published since the mid-nineties, begins, For the last couple of decades, there has been a museum in Walley, dedicated to preserving photos and butter churns and horse harnesses and an old dentists chair and a cumbersome apple peeler and such curiosities as the pretty little porcelain-and-glass insulators that were used on telegraph poles. She is promising no drama, no transcendence, only the peculiarity of objects that contain the history of our world and our ancestors, if not ourselves. The adjectives gather toward the end of the sentence like firefliesold, then cumbersome, then pretty little, applied to something that almost no one might have noticed. Through these adjectives, Munros consciousness enters the museum, and the promise is that history will come alive, not the history of great events or famous people but of those who might have made practical use of these objects indoors and outdoors. The Love of a Good Woman is full of moral reversals and paradoxesit is, in fact, a murder mystery transformed into an everyday event, and therefore much more interesting, since the actions and motives of the characters remain unknown to some and consciously hidden by others. What we come to care about is not what happened to the man who is found by some boys, drowned in his car in the middle of a lake, but the emotional life and the thought processes of Enid, a good woman, who makes her living caring for difficult patients, and who has a lingering fondness for Rupert, a boy she and her friends had teased in middle school. Those random objects in the first sentence, attended to by the narrative voice, promise detail, contemplation, care.

In a short interview Munro did with Deborah Treisman, for The New Yorker upon the publication of her last book of stories, Dear Life, Munro reflects on her choice of form with typical modesty. She says, For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation. Munro, though, has made of the short story something new, using precision of language and complexity of emotion to cut out the relaxed parts of the novel and focus on the essence of transformation. One of my favorite stories in this volume is Too Much Happiness, which I might have written as a three-hundred-page historical account. Sophia Kovalevsky is that rarest of beings, a female mathematical genius, and Russian, to boot. She wins a prestigious prize but has a hard time finding employment, she marries for escape, not love, and must juggle her talents, her obligations, and her social position every minute of every day. Munro begins in her usual authoritative way, signaling that she understands Sophias mathematical insights, and she weaves into the narrative Sophias past and present dilemmas, getting close enough for us to witness Sophias surprise at the sight of her lover in a crowd, then far enough away for us to survey the landscape Sophia travels through in her attempt to escape a smallpox outbreak. Sophia is convincingly Russian, convincingly a woman of her time, convincingly appealing. The arc of her very dramatic story lasts seventy-five pages, and then is done, reduced, concentrated, left to simmer in the readers mind with all sorts of thoughts about the history of women, and ones own history of trying to make something of the life one is given, overwhelming and too soon finished, for since Munros chosen form is the short story, her overriding theme is brevitylook now, act now, contemplate now, because soon, very soon, this thing that involves you will be over.