With the news that Alice Munro passed away yesterday, I’m re-publishing a book review I wrote of her final collection, Dear Life, originally published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2012. One day I might write an essay about her work, perhaps titled “The Commas of Consciousness,” about how her prose style takes you inside the consciousness of her characters. For now, this review sums up much of what I might say about her work.
Fiction Review: “Dear Life”
Originally published Nov. 21, 2012, in the Richmond Times-Dispatch
Fans of Alice Munro need only be told that she has a new collection available. After all, she’s earned every bit of her reputation as being one of the best living short story writers, in English if not in the entire world. For those new to her work, “Dear Life,” her 12th collection of short stories, is as good a place to start as any.
Sometimes established literary writers rest on their laurels, become long-winded and churn out slack prose as though every word that comes to mind is worth putting on the page.
Not so with Alice Munro, who turned 81 this summer. Although some of the stories in “Dear Life” are long and revisit the familiar terrain of her previous work, all of these stories are as engaging and fresh as anything she’s ever written.
Fans will recognize these as classic Munro stories, set predominantly in small-town Canada near Lake Huron in the years between World War II and today. These are realist stories about the secret inner lives of ordinary people—family history, affairs of the heart and body, spiritual alienation and the yearning for connection—during a life-altering moment of chance.
A woman commits adultery on a train. A man proposes to and sleeps with his employee, only to break off the engagement. Two characters pay off a servant to keep their affair quiet. A man, returning from war, jumps off a train rather than commit to his earlier life. A woman tries to make sense of her aunt and uncle’s marriage.
Munro has been compared to Chekhov because what she offers us is a revelation of character. She knows her characters, and she cuts right to the quick of human motivation. But what makes her such a captivating writer is her authorial restraint. Like Flaubert, she removes herself and her judgments and lets the ragged consciousness of her characters emerge.
One way she achieves this is through her use of the word “seem,” which might be the most powerful word in the fiction writer’s arsenal, going back to Shakespeare, to Iago’s ambiguous motivation in “Othello.” This word places doubt on the private, inner lives of Munro’s characters, right from the collection’s opening sentence:
“Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way.” Here we are in the woman’s head, and Munro is careful to distinguish between what she knows—Peter’s actions—and what she assumes—Peter’s motivation.
Doubt, and the effort to know the heart and mind of another person, seems to be the key to Munro’s greatness. The stories in “Dear Life” are filled with uncertainty, curiosity and a desire to understand and be understood.
From “To Reach Japan”: “It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not.”
From “Amundsen”: “About that I was probably mistaken.”
From “Leaving Maverly”: “So there were changes, after all.”
From “Pride”: “Some people get everything wrong. How can I explain?”
The last four stories in this collection are sectioned off with an author’s note that explains they are not quite stories, but rather comprise a unit “that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely in fact.” It seems fitting that Munro herself is unable to escape her doubtful eye.
The autobiographical element might be of interest to academics, but as a whole, this collection represents fiction at its finest—captivating, complex, lifelike.