The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro ed. by David Staines (review)

In putting together this Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, David Staines has brilliantly fulfilled the series’ aim of providing a comprehensive introduction to the work of a major writer. The book gathers ten essays by writers and academics from Canada and Europe. Munro emerges as the extraordinary stylist that she is, while the cultural context that has shaped her work and the critical context in which she is read are also examined. The collection thus expands on some of the key points in the scholarly analysis of Munro’s work.

Staines opens the collection with a biographical essay, ‘Alice Munro in her Canadian context’, which emphasises the role of reading, as well as writing, in Munro’s life. He also provides insights into her place in Canadian letters by evoking his friendship with her. Merilyn Simonds relies on her intimate knowledge of Munro’s oeuvre to tackle the theme of place across a wide range of stories. Douglas Glover, in his analysis of Munro’s style, shares his reading experience of Lives of Girls and Women from the viewpoint of a writer. Maria Löschnigg takes up Adrian Hunter’s characterisation of Munro’s stories as ‘interrogative’ to examine Munro’s ‘undogmatic feminism’.

Coral Ann Howells, in ‘Alice Munro and her life writing’, demonstrates how each published version of the autobiographical stories has a different inflexion, mirroring the subtleties of language and interpretation. Margaret Atwood approaches Lives of Girls and Women as ‘A portrait of the artist as a young woman’ to argue that in this collection, Munro developed her characteristic reconciliation of opposites. In ‘Re-reading The Moons of Jupiter’, W.H. New explores, as reader, the many points of entry of this collection, implicitly deconstructing Aristotle’s statement that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Robert McGill, in ‘Alice Munro and personal development’, argues that Munro’s fiction challenges the notion of progress, which may also be read metafictionally as a challenge to the notion that a writer ‘progresses’ in her writing. Héliane Ventura sounds the bottomless intertextuality of Munro’s oeuvre, revealing how Munro, aka ‘The female bard’ of Canada, has been ‘retrieving Greek myths, Celtic ballads, Norse sagas, and popular songs’ to surreptitiously work them, metamorphosed, into her narratives. Elizabeth Hay offers a personal response to Munro’s stories that deal with mothers and how they convey the coexistence of contradictory feelings.

The essays converge on the conclusion that Munro’s stories never lead to a single interpretation; meaning is by definition plural and provisional. This may vary not only with each reader, but with each reading. The personal tone of some of the essays responds to Munro’s conversational tone; reading, like writing, is mostly an intimate act. The Companion leaves the impression that reading and discussing Munro is an ongoing conversation – a conversation very much enriched by this multifaceted book.