Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (A Biography) (review)

Thacker's biography of Alice Munro is a successful act of navigation: it traces the 'parallel tracks' between the fiction and the facts (and stories) of Munro's life without nailing the one to the other too closely; it is clearly the product of meticulous research from a wealth of sources without becoming overburdened with academic apparatus; it keeps his characterization of Munro in full view even as the story dictates lists of prizes, excerpts and syntheses from scores of reviews, and a minor dissertation on Canadian publishing over the last five or six decades. Thacker, restraining his literary analyses in favour of the biographical impulse, nevertheless uses his own sensitively honed academic writing skills to do justice to Munro's literary life story. He manages to show the shapes of certain trajectories, without succumbing to the 'arrogant desire to impose a narrative' on the life. Despite using the major theme of 'becoming "Alice Munro"' to shape his chapters and chapter sections, he refrains from telling the story from the point of view of its 'end' (as Munro reputedly told the author, she's 'not dead yet'). It is rare that Thacker will mention let alone belabour the ironies occasioned by some of the early reception of Munro's writing, for instance, given what we all know is to come.

The pleasures of this book are many. A true aficionado of Munro's writing, Thacker uses much of it in his biography. The reader is treated to Munro's cadences throughout, in the various forms of published work, draft versions, letters, interviews, and the recollections of others. Further, Thacker's own style is confident, insightful, and occasionally even 'Munrovian' without drawing attention to itself as such. Avoiding any sensationalism in Munro's domestic affairs, a more vigorous style is judiciously reserved for certain 'page-turner' episodes having to do, ironically enough, with Canadian publishing. Munro's agent Virginia Barber establishing herself as a force to be reckoned with is one such, as are the legal battles to have Macmillan release The Progress of Love to allow Douglas Gibson to take it with him to McClelland and Stewart.

The jacket announces, 'This book is chronological,' and in the strictest sense it is; but Thacker is by no means linear. He proceeds as Munro's fiction does, described in novelist Thomas Wharton's words: 'with stops and starts and backtrackings and revelations, surprises that divert us from our intended path along unexpected branchings.' Thacker repeats patterns, phrases, and episodes, introducing a future step, backtracking to lead up to it again in a more leisurely fashion, returning to it much later to pluck a string again; it is masterfully done, intricately structured, worthy of his chosen author. As Wharton goes on to write: it is important 'not to read too much [Munro], too fast'; the same can be said of this biography. It will not reward a rushed reading, episodes from the annals of Canadian publishing notwithstanding.

The quibbles are few and, in the balance, slight. The genealogy of early chapters is occasionally overwhelming; a family tree or two would have been of enough help to mention. The thirty-two pages of photographs are good; it would have been nice to see one of Virginia Barber, as such an important figure in Munro's career, as well as Robert Weaver, Douglas Gibson, and a few key others. As Munro isn't 'dead yet,' the reader can appreciate the biographer's deference to his living subject on details such as her health problems over recent years; Munro's co-operation in this project has perhaps had such minor consequences as these, but by the same token there must be a more recent photograph of Munro than that taken in 2002 at the dedication of the garden in her name; the jacket photo, while perfectly depicting the retiring writer, dates from 1996. Still, Thacker remains up to the minute by keeping consideration of Munro's promised next book, Power in the Blood, in speculative sight...