FICTION IN REVIEW: ALICE MUNRO

1 5 9 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W J A N E M E N D E L S O H N It is a privilege and a pleasure to write about Alice Munro. When I began this piece, before Munro had won the Nobel Prize, I was thrilled to have a chance to discuss her work and the book she has claimed will be its culmination, the extraordinary short-story collection Dear Life. Now that her literary importance has been so clearly recognized and rewarded, this essay feels less as if it should be a review, or even an appreciation, and more as though it deserves to be a celebration. Let the champagne flow, especially for those of us who have been reading, admiring, marveling at, and deeply moved by Munro’s stories these past few decades. To begin with: the genius of Munro, and the reason legions of her fans were overjoyed when she won the Nobel, is that she has not, as so many writers, artists, and other people have, been striving for greatness. About ten or so years ago someone mentioned to me how impressed he was that a couple of mutual friends were ‘‘really going for it, really striving for greatness.’’ We were standing in the playground in Washington Square Park, and I was D e a r L i f e : S t o r i e s , by Alice Munro (Vintage, 336 pp., $15.95 paper) 1 6 0 M E N D E L S O H N Y pushing my daughter on a swing. I nodded my head but vividly remember thinking, ‘‘Striving for greatness is a prescription for mediocrity.’’ (Or tragedy, I could have added.) I thought it because I had spent my life reading books by brilliant writers who had been delivering that message for centuries, but I believed it because I had been enjoying and learning from the stories of Alice Munro since I was a teenager. Striving for greatness suggests a narcissism that is entirely absent from Munro’s work. She writes about narcissistic characters , the provincial mother with a grandiose self-image being the most frequent (and the most likely to use a phrase like ‘‘striving for greatness’’), and she explores and exposes all kinds of selfabsorption , small-mindedness, intentional and unintentional cruelties , and human failings in practically every one of her stories. She even describes in interviews, and reveals in the autobiographical air that emanates sometimes from the stories themselves, choices made in the struggles between marriage and self, motherhood and writing that could be described – that even she describes – as selfish. However, her sensibility, her unsparing and broad perspective, is not narcissistic. And selfishness of the kind she writes about is often the result of social, historical, and economic constraints that she also details with unerring precision. The vision of her work is outward-looking, generous, profoundly interested in existence. She has been pursuing this interest her whole career with steadfast focus. (In my mind she appears as a brave, beloved, and slightly, charmingly comic figure: an indefatigable sailor crossing an ocean alone, hand on the tiller, hair in the wind.) It is not that she hasn’t been writing great stories, or even trying to write great stories – she has – it’s that she has been concentrating on the task at hand, not on an image of herself or other people’s ideas about her or her work. At least that is the feeling, the open secret – one of her collections is titled Open Secrets – she consistently conveys. So Alice Munro has become, for many writers and readers, a kind of hero, a female hero, or a heroine, whichever term you prefer, and this is fitting because female heroism, as it manifests itself in ordinary lives, is her great subject. Yes, she can certainly be considered one of those regional writers whose work extends to F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 6 1 R all humanity; she writes often about small towns in Ontario, where she grew up and later...