This collection was my introduction to Alice Munro's work and it taught me that the true pleasure in reading short stories is to take them slowly, reading no more than one a day to let each wash over me.
Munro's technique is immersive. Instead of cramming the narrative with descriptive words which bring the reader's mind to the story, her best stories (at least the ones I like best) somehow convey a feeling, an atmosphere. Often as I began reading a story, I would try to resist, but like the anesthetic mask that knocks you out as you're thinking, "This isn't going to..." a character's gesture or the things not explained would pull me in within a few paragraphs.
I particularly enjoyed the stories that treat the powerful pull of home and the need to resist that pull, or the unexpectedly deep connections that link people whose paths cross only briefly.
Jane Smiley, in her introduction, says her favorite stories are the ones with a historical perspective. Those were my least favorite. Those stories — such as “Too Much Happiness” — we enter from an outsider’s point of view, with a high angle perspective, looking down on “a small woman and a large man … walking in the Old Cemetery, in Genoa. Both of them are around forty years old.” It forces the reader to connect mentally to a character before we’re emotionally engaged.
In my favorites, Munro pulls us into the subjective world of the narrator, and the narrator’s values become our values. In “The Runaway,” we shrink from view with Carla. We don’t know why we’re hiding with her, but as with a person we’ve just met and immediately like, we throw in our lot with hers, willing to learn why later.
Smiley quotes an interview in which Munro 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.” It’s such a human moment — the recognition and acceptance of one’s limits. But then to flourish within them! It reminded me of Joan Didion’s great essay “On Self-Respect:” “...character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
This respect for self and life’s limitations is also found in the inherent dignity of the father in Munro’s “Working for a Living.” Asked when is the best time in a man’s life, this man who takes such satisfaction in his job as caretaker in a factory, says when you’re “old enough that you could see that a lot of things you might have wanted out of life you would never get. It was hard to explain how you could be happy in such a situation, but sometimes he thought you were.”
It’s in this story, too, that the narrator considers the inner, private worlds to be found “all over the country, in every town and city… You passed them in a car or on the train and never gave a thought to what was going on inside. Something that took up the whole of people’s lives. A never-ending over-and-over attention-consuming, life-consuming process.”
It’s this never ending, life-consuming yet hidden process that Munro explores, reveals and dignifies in story after story.
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