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

Critics who are primarily seen as creative writers are something of breed apart in critical analysis. As real practitioners – makers of literature – they should know, after all. I am thinking here of W.H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Robert Kroetsch, John Metcalf, and their like. In this Cambridge Companion, fully half of the contributors are writers, while the balance are established critics. One of the contributors, Robert McGill, is both.

First, the critics. Editor David Staines offers an apt introduction by pointing to Alice Munro's reputation in the years just before the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. He follows this with an introductory article tracing Munro 'in her Canadian Context.' There, Staines quite effectively mines the published interviews Munro has given from early in her career until just before the Nobel Prize; he weaves an account of her career and her relation to Huron County, punctuating it with some apt details from his own connections with her. Articles by two writers follow, after which Maria Loschnigg analyses Munro's 'Undogmatic Feminism.' This is a very complete discussion of a key issue, one that is well grounded in Munro's texts. Next, Coral Ann Howells looks at Munro's 'Life Writing,' focusing on the group of stories Munro long held back and eventually published in revised form in The View from Castle Rock. Comparing the earlier published versions to those found in the book, Howells offers a careful and well-focused introductory examination of the issue. This is fine, but she seems to have no knowledge of the archival provenance of the stories she treats, nor does she engage with my own discussions of life writing in Munro. By contrast, W.H. New, in 'Re-reading The Moons of Jupiter,' takes up that earlier important collection and is alert to its every nuance – archival, biographical, critical, textual. In much the same way, Heliane Ventura examines the 'encoding of intertextual and intermusical references' throughout Munro quite completely; while some of the allusions she asserts seem far-fetched, her analysis makes sense overall. Looking at personal development, McGill asserts that Munro's stories offer a'self-reflexive insistence that there is always more to be discovered' in her characters' lives; treating 'Train' as his primary text, but telescoping its connections throughout Munro's work, he argues compellingly that her 'career has been marked more by continuity and recursion than transformation.' This is the best critical article here, and the most significant contribution.

Now the writers. Being writers themselves, they eschew critics. Thus, none here cites any critical writing on Munro. They read her works. Merilyn Simonds quite reasonably argues that 'in the fictional world of Alice Munro, place is a shifty thing,' calling it 'a kind of bedrock to her stories,' it is '[b]eguiling. Ephemeral and everlasting"; it is a good article. And Margaret Atwood offers a fine close reading of Lives of Girls and Women as KUnstlerroman; nothing new, but it is interesting coming from her. The standout articles by writers here are by Douglas Glover and Elizabeth Hay. The former also focuses on Lives of Girls and Women in 'The Style of Alice Munro,' precisely tracing Munro's style as one borne of syntactical moves and continual qualification. Glover brought this same sharp analytical acumen to his 'The Mind of Alice Munro' (2010), another singular analysis; this article is even better, elaborating Munro's style in her putative novel to argue that she repeatedly asserts 'that reality is an unstable article, not to be trusted.'

But if Glover's analysis is singular, Hay's is unique. Her 'The Mother as Material' is neigh on to a perfect piece of analysis. Separating Munro's stories 'about her own mother' from the rest of her work, Hay asserts that they offer 'a deeper and more personal truth than I was used to finding in fiction.' 'It had to do,'she continues, 'with the way intimate yet tentative knowledge about one's mother leads to unsparing selfknowledge.' Moving...