Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel by W.R. Martin (review)

172 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 Certain themes persist through the epistolary body. McLuhan's unflagging generosity to his friends; an energetic mania that prompted Eric Havelock to say 'You are a man who works always near the bone, pushing his nerves to the limit'; the almost numbing fidelity to the curmudgeonly Wyndham Lewis in aid of his plight in North America; his unstinting devotion to his mother; and the undeflectable good humour and irrepressible sense of intellectual play. We have a growing sense of the magnitude of the man who advertised to Ezra Pound that he was 'an intellectual thug who has slowlybeen accumulating a private arsenal with everyintention ofusingit.' The editors ofthese letters deserve the highest praise for pulling together a life through this judiciously selected mosaic. (FRANK ZINGRONE) W.R. Martin. Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel University of Alberta Press. xiv, 235. $25.00; $14.95 paper Alice Munro's brilliant, complex, and deceptively simple writing is a challenge to critics. W.R. Martin accepts that challenge. The task he sets himself is, he tells us, 'a close reading' of the fiction. Thus, he comments on more than seventy stories individually. Lives of Girls and Women he treats as a unit, although he remains undecided whether to term it a novel or a collection of stories. He concludes his chapter on this work with a brief section titled 'Linked Stories or Novel?' but does not answer the question. Martin proceeds chronologically. He includes in his study uncollected stories - early stories of the 1950S and a few since then - and ends with five of the eleven stories in The Progress of Love (1986). While he makes reference to this text, he wrote his commentaries before the book was published and obviously did not return to the task to rewrite this chapter. Martin's method does not allow for close scrutiny; there are simply too many stories to treat in the allotted space. He devotes one to three pages to each story. Chronological discussion does, however, allow him to examine the development of Munro's craft, and this is his main focus. Martin also shows a special interest in the relationships between stories and the ways in which one story illuminates another. He is intrigued by the arrangement of the stories in the volumes, the effect, for example, of juxtaposing stories which explore different aspects of a theme. In each collection, he discovers a principle of arrangement; nevertheless, it remains uncertain to what extent or with what intention Munro planned the order of the stories. Another aspect of Martin's critical method is frequent allusion to other twentieth-century writers - James Joyce, Henry James, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence - as a means of setting Munro in a literary context. HUMANITIES 173 With the exception of interviewers of Munro, he seldom refers to other Munro critics. As space and method preclude in-depth analysis, this text is perhaps more appropriate to the studentthan the scholar, but all Munro scholars will find the bibliography of her fiction, including uncollected stories and the original publication of collected stories, a useful tool. (LORRAINE MCMULLEN) Andre Belleau. Surprendre les voix: Essais Boreal 1986. 233. $16·95 ,) Liberte (fevrier 1987): 'Andre Belleau.' 169. $5.00 The two publications under review came out within a few months of each other following the death in the fall of 1986 of Andre Belleau, a prizewinning teacher at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, researcher, brilliant critic, and writer. Although his books were few in number (an earlier version of the present essay collection, Ya-t-il un intellectuel dans la salle?, 1984, and his very perceptive Le Romancier fictif: Essai sur la representation de l'ecrivain dans Ie roman quebecois, 1980), he left a sure mark on Quebec's intellectual environment. As the editors of Liberte point out in their 'Presentation' of the special issue dedicated to him, 'Au total quantativement restreinte, cette oeuvre atteint toutefois une densite et une pertinence qui expliquent l'influence de son auteur sur nombre d'entre nous, amis, universitaires, etudiants et lecteurs ....' (Belleau did leave behind an unfinished manuscript on Rabelais, and had planned a book of memoirs, a collection of fantastic...