As you’ve probably heard by now, Alice Munro died last month, at the age of 92. The Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer of short stories—a form that takes a back seat to the novel in terms of both popularity and respect—was one of the very greatest writers of her generation. So, I thought I’d share with you this week a few thoughts on my two favorite Alice Munro stories.
One of the best perks of teaching is that you spend deep, thoughtful time, often over the course of years, with the same pieces and thereby get to know them intimately. It’s hard to find the time to read broadly when you’re teaching, but I found I read more deeply when I was teaching a piece than I ever did when I read for pleasure—because I had to. Great pieces then reward you for that work by unfolding like tablecloths, a fold at a time, and spreading themselves out as if to prepare a banquet for you, which is essentially what they end up doing.
I had the pleasure and privilege of that experience with two of Munro’s stories, from her collection Open Secrets. The first piece in the collection is titled “Carried Away,” and it tells the story of a small-town librarian who lives alone in the town hotel and nurtures a crush on one of the library patrons after he initiates a correspondence with her. She can’t recall who he is—he’s off serving in the military—but she eagerly takes up the correspondence nevertheless. One thing I love about this story is that the point an ordinary writer would consider the ending is the point at which Munro’s story begins to unfold again and again—surprise, surprise, surprise. Seventeen pages into “Carried Away” (Munro’s stories tend to run long), when you might have fooled yourself into thinking you understood what it was doing, a new section begins:
When Arthur came home from the factory a little before noon he shouted, “Stay out of my way till I wash! There’s been an accident over at the works!” Nobody answered. Mrs. Feare, the housekeeper, was talking on the kitchen telephone so loudly that she could not hear him, and his daughter was of course at school. He washed, and stuffed everything he had been wearing into the hamper, and scrubbed up the bathroom, like a murderer.
My annotations from a first reading of “Carried Away” tell something of the experience of this jarring shift. The name Arthur is underlined with a question mark—who is this character suddenly intruding on the story? “Protagonist shifts,” I wrote. This section of the story is titled “Accidents,” and I wrote in the margin in my purple pen, “in love, pregnancy, etc.” The housekeeper’s name is, ominously, Mrs. Feare, and the fact that Arthur is compared to a murderer makes you wonder whether he’s somehow responsible for the accident at the factory. All this and more is happening in just these five sentences.
Munro breaks the rules like this in many of her stories. At times, it seems miraculous that anyone ever published them.
That’s even more true of my other favorite story from Open Secrets, titled “The Albanian Virgin.” This story—even longer—is one of those dual pieces in which a historical story line plays out beside a contemporary one, but in this case, while the reader tries to hold the seams together and figure out how to neatly match up the two stories, Munro follows behind snip-snipping away at those efforts. One half of “The Albanian Virgin” involves a young Canadian woman in perhaps the 1920s traveling solo in Albania, who has the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s kidnapped by a local tribe and “carried away” to live with them. Her story is told by a troublesome character in the contemporary story to the second protagonist, a young woman who owns a bookstore.
I heard this story in the old St. Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria from Charlotte, who was the sort of friend I had in my early days there. My friendships then seemed both intimate and uncertain. I never knew why people told me things, or what they meant me to believe.
The same could be said, at times, of Munro’s stories.
One of the deepest pleasures of reading an Alice Munro story is her ability to convey so much through the light touch of specific details. Take, for example, this passage after the abduction of the woman whom the Albanians call Lottar.
She was lying, perhaps for weeks, on a heaped-up bed of ferns. It was comfortable, and had the advantage of being easily changed when fouled or bloodied. The old woman named Tima looked after her. She plugged up the wound with a paste made of beeswax and olive oil and pine resin. Several times a day the dressing was removed, the wound washed out with raki. Lottar could see black lace curtains hanging from the rafters, and she thought she was in her room at home, with her mother (who was dead) looking after her. “Why have you hung up those curtains?” she said. “They look horrible.”
She was really seeing cobwebs, all thick and furry with smoke—ancient cobwebs, never disturbed from year to year.
Nothing more is said about the cobwebs, including Lottar’s reaction to them. Nothing more needs to be said because the reader’s reaction is enough. We’re lolled into thinking everything is all right because the bed of ferns is comfortable and the old woman seems to know how to care for her. (Also, Munro seems very much to have done her research.) The horrible realization about the cobwebs stands in for the horrible realization of Lottar’s general situation.
I haven’t even begun to tell you enough of either of these stories to spoil them for you. If you’re in the mood for reading some Alice Munro, I recommend them both, and the rest of Open Secrets, too.
Alice Munro never wrote a novel, though her collection of linked short stories, Lives of Girls and Women, is sometimes called a novel. She told The New York Times way back in 1986:
I don't really understand a novel. I don't understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story. There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
Munro didn’t have to write a novel. Joyce Carol Oates articulated why. In Munro’s obituary in the Times, Oates is quoted as having said that Munro’s stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.”
That’s how good she was.
Sad to say I only read one of Munro’s stories, Runaway, but I still have a visual of parts of it. I will remedy that by treating myself to one of her books soon! She was wonderful! I am reading my first Charles Martin books from 2010 called The Mountain Between Us; talk about visuals. It’s about a small charter plan that goes down and what they do to survive. I’m already in love with the orthopedic surgeon but then I find out there’s a movie with Idris Elba. Oh joy! Happy reading!