‘Too Many Things’: Reading Alice Munro's ‘The Love of a Good Woman’

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 CATHERINE SHELDRICK ROSS >Too Many Things=: Reading Alice Munro=s >The Love of a Good Woman= The effect of a vintage Munro story resembles Italo Calvino=s description of fable: >[T]he fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where is it leading? To the point at which something not yet said, something as yet only darkly felt by presentiment, suddenly appears and seizes us and tears us to pieces, like the fangs of a man-eating witch= (18). With The Love of a Good Woman, Munro offers her readers eight stories that seize us by the throat. How does she do it? She has returned to earlier material and rewritten it in a form that is more complex and multilayered. So, for example, >Cortes Island= seems to have swallowed up >The Office= as just one element among many, while >The Love of a Good Woman= can be read, in part, as a return to themes and characters that appeared in >Images= and >Friend of My Youth.= Readers can keep up with these dazzling new stories because Alice Munro has given us a long apprenticeship in reading her kind of story. Previous experience with earlier Munro stories, where the patterns are clearer, provides a sort of scaffolding helpful in making sense of these latest works. In the stories in this collection, I found myself digging down through layers and following threads backward through to earlier handlings of the same material. Underneath a reading of the current story are the contours of previous readings of earlier stories, in which some of the same material is handled but with variations. This seems to be especially true of >The Love of a Good Woman,= which Robert Thacker has called >a central Munro text= with echoes of previous Munro stories (1) and Dennis Duffy has called a >capstone= and >pivotal work in the structure of her fiction= (169). An apprenticeship in reading Munro teaches the importance of things that are off to the side, just out of our line of vision, innocent objects that we normally pass over. In >The Love of a Good Woman,= the reader is challenged to make sense of a text that contains so much and that refuses to subordinate the plurality of its detail within a single frame. One strategy for writers and readers is to work towards clarity by leaving out detail and emphasizing an overall design usually derived from the patterns of genre This paper was first presented at the 1999 Conference >A Visionary Tradition: Canadian Literature and Culture at the Turn of the Millennium= organized by J.R. (Tim) Struthers at the University of Guelph. A version of it was presented at the 2002 Indian Association of Canadian university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 Studies conference in Haridwar, India. or of myth. An opposite approach is to work towards complexity by including details that don=t fit patterns and often subvert them. Lorna Irvine argues, following Frank Kermode, >The first process tends towards clarity and propriety ..., the second toward secrecy, toward distortions which cover secrets= (104). In >Differently= from Friend of My Youth, Munro seems to be describing her own refusal to simplify. When Georgia took a creative writing course, the instructor told her that she was putting in >Too many things. 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?= So when Georgia wrote a story about her grandfather killing chickens, >[s]he made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story= (Friend, 216). A major effect in a Munro story is achieved by the reader=s sense that Munro has included too many things to be held together in the same frame. Some overlooked thing can be expected to emerge from the shadows to overturn any achieved pattern. In >The Love of a Good Woman,= the list of >too many things going on at the same time= minimally includes the following: $ a red box...