Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013 by Robert Thacker (review)

Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013 charts a dual story: that of Munro and that of her biographer, bibliographer, and critic Robert Thacker. As Thacker reveals in his introduction, the 1970s was an especially propitious period both for Munro, whose writing was gaining increased scholarly attention, and for Canadian literature. In 1973–4, Thacker, then a twenty-two-year-old recent graduate, discovered Munro's 'Material' in the Tamarack Review (the story was subsequently collected in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)). Munro and Willa Cather will become the principal foci of Thacker's scholarship: his major projects on Munro include an annotated bibliography (1984) and a biography (2005, rev. 2011). I myself had discovered Munro in a similarly formative and equally exciting moment in the 2000s when I was assigned 'Open Secrets', the titular story of her 1994 collection. Subsequent encounters with Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Runaway (2004) during my undergraduate studies immersed me into the worlds of her fiction.

Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013 brings together 16 essays written over four decades and it aims 'to track a perpetually deepening fascination with Munro's writing, and because of that writing and its effects, with her life and the trajectory of her writing career' (p. 4). Thacker introduces us to Munro and to Munro criticism and, in so doing, 'define[s] her emergence and . . . contextualise[s] that emergence within Canadian literature during the last decades of the previous century and the first years of the current one' (p. 18). Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013 epitomizes the value of scholarly dedication and of single-author studies: Thacker's own is a source of considerable inspiration and it is doubly refreshing to see how his voice grew even as Munro's did. The critical reflection, a mode that Thacker employed to great effect in both the book's introduction and afterword, makes an especially strong case for archival research.

Thacker organized his essays and reviews chronologically and into three thematically linked sections, each prefaced with an insightful introduction: 'Narrative Techniques, Forms, and Critical Issues: Establishing a Presence', 'What the Archives Reveal: Reading a Deepening Aesthetic', and 'Understanding the Oeuvre'. Thacker kept his revisions to a minimum, reasoning, 'I am both leaving myself as I was as a critic when the essays were originally published and encouraging readers toward the critical specifics of that time–the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s' (p. 9). His decision to retain quotations from Munro's stories that he analyses on multiple occasions is motivated by his source material: 'It seems appropriate, in a book on a writer who so emphatically and deeply draws from her own place and culture, and who returns to repeat herself, to allow these assertions and passages to repeat–central as they are to Munro's art' (p. 13). Thacker and the University of Calgary Press should be applauded for this valuable contribution to scholarship and for making it publicly available as an open access book.