Thomas Mallon
SELECTED STORIES by Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus, R110)
ALICE MUNRO’S deeply imagined, almost awesome Selected Stories turn William Faulkner’s famous musing about the past’s not really being past into an understatement. In Munro’s world, the present is scarcely present; the moment we live in is just a flask in which the past’s vapours mingle and assert their continuing will. The past itself – the location of psychological destiny – is most often a place, the Canadian hometown or distant rural origin of a present-day narrator. Toronto, in Munro’s geography, is a suburb of little towns like Dalgleish and Carstairs and West Hanratty.
Her stories lead back to boarding houses and farms and old department stores, into long-ago jiltings and drownings and suppressed longings that haven’t stopped resonating somewhere else. “Serious people – that’s how I would try to describe them,” says the narrator about her parents in The Progress of Love. “Serious the way hardly anybody is anymore.”
It’s a good description of both this collection’s dramatis personae and the stories themselves. If Munro’s basic subject matter may sometimes feel circumscribed, what she accomplishes with it, imaginatively, seems nearly limitless.
Many of these long short stories (just 28 in 545 large pages) contain a novel’s worth of characters, almost all of them stood up and set running with remarkable speed. In Chaddeleys and Flemings, a narrator wonders if her mother’s cousin Iris had “always been like this, always brash and greedy and scared, decent, maybe even admirable …” Within a couple of pages, each adjective in the string has been dramatised and earned.
An impatient reader may want to say of Munro what an exasperated creative-writing teacher remarks about the work of one of her characters: “Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.”
But to Munro it’s all important, and the careful reader will find it all interesting, will soon get used to the layers and byways of the author’s narrative style, which works, to use one story’s words about another matter, “like a dream that goes back and back into other dreams, over hills and through doorways …”
Some of these stories’ mysteries never yield themselves up, but Munro’s inconclusiveness is more satisfying than most writers’ clarity. The barely explained malignity in Vandals – two adults’ trashing of an empty house – proves as chilling as a stack of corpses would.
The frequency with which a character’s personal reflections seem to apply to Munro’s own subtleties testifies to her integrity of method and matter. The whole volume makes one believe anew in fiction’s power to transfigure even the bland and bleak.
In Material, the narrator marvels at the exactitude with which her ex-husband, a writer, has rendered in prose their hapless former housemate: Dotty “was lucky to live in that basement for a few months and eventually to have this done to her, though she doesn’t know what has been done and wouldn’t care for it, probably, if she did know. She has passed into Art. It doesn’t happen to everybody.”
I suspect there are dozens of souls, from one end of Canada to the other, glimpsed by Alice Munro over the past half-century, who will never know they are equally elect. – The Washington Post