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

Robert Thacker introduces Reading Alice Munro: 1973–2013 with the story of how his chance reading of Munro's story 'Material' in the Tamarack Review in 1973 sparked a life-long 'obsession' with her work that led eventually to his celebratory biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2011). Reading Alice Munro republishes in their original form most of the articles and reviews having to do with Munro's writing that Thacker produced between 1983 and 2013. The rationale behind the book is Thacker's hope that its pieces, collected together, 'offer a cogent record of the emergence of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as [he] saw that emergence and understood it.' As this statement indicates, this book is as much about the development of Thacker's own critical and biographical preoccupations where Munro's work is concerned as it is about Munro's work itself, and this focus is the source both of its strengths and its limitations.

Throughout the book, Thacker asserts his conviction that archival research is crucial to understanding Munro's work. He speculates that he 'may be the only person who has read the entire Munro archive' at the University of Calgary, and the most compelling pieces in Reading Alice Munro are those that are directly informed by his detailed familiarity with what the archive reveals about the development of Munro's career as 'an allegory of Canadian publishing since the Second World War' and about the methods by which she goes about crafting and revising her stories. The article 'A 'Booming Tender Sadness': Alice Munro's Irish' examines archival materials connected with Munro's research for a television script she was commissioned to write by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a 1978 series called The Newcomers/Les arrivants. For Thacker, these materials reveal the impetus for the 'new, research-based direction' that Munro's short-story writing subsequently took in better-known works such as 'Dulse' and 'Meneseteung.' As many of these articles show, Thacker is distinguished among Munro critics by his close attention to unpublished drafts and uncollected stories, and, throughout the book, he takes other scholars to task for failing to make adequate use of the archive. Whatever the reason for this neglect (the increasing number of scholars who lack access to research travel funding, perhaps, or the experience of one critic to whom Munro denied permission to quote from her archived letters, a controversy Thacker briefly alludes to), it is regrettable since Thacker's own archival research offers some fascinating glimpses into the more obscure corners of Munro's career, such as her forays into publishing poetry. A note to the article 'Alice Munro's Willa Cather' alludes to an untitled poem that Munro published in the Canadian Forum in 1967 under her mother's maiden name, Anne Chamney.

Not surprisingly, Thacker is deeply committed to taking a broadly biographical approach to Munro's writing; however, his interest in the intersection of her work and her life occasionally runs away with him. While it is generally accepted that there is a strong autobiographical element to stories like 'The Ottawa Valley' and 'Friend of My Youth,' Thacker's suggestion that 'My Mother's Dream' is similarly concerned with 'Munro's mother' is odd and, at the very least, would seem to call for further explanation. Several of the articles assert the importance of Munro's connection to her 'home place' of southwestern Ontario. If this regionalist emphasis on the relationship between 'place and character' in her work sometimes seems a bit dated, datedness is perhaps an understandable drawback in a collection of republished material, some of which dates from the early 1980s. Another drawback to this collection is its repetitiveness; reading the book from cover to cover, one encounters the same quotations from the same sources again and again. While one might question the need to republish these articles when so many of them are readily available elsewhere, Thacker remains an important voice in...