Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro
Deignan, Tom
LIFE IN A SENTENCE Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Alice Munro Tom Deignan On the halcyon days before he became Oprah Winfrey's sparring partner, National Book...
...This is mostly a good thing, giving her stories unique depth...
...Munro's obsession with men and women, and how they circle each other, is certainly, if subtly, political...
...Though a politically engaged "city person" and a columnist at a local paper, Alfrida is actually quite reactionary...
...Times writer Emily Eakin speculated that though Franzen "tackles heady themes," he is also "betting that there is demand for stories with the emotional satisfactions of Alice Munro...
...Her dedicated fans will grasp the layered meaning of a wry line from the bittersweet story, "What Is Remembered," about an author who writes "a certain kind of story-not the kind that anybody wrote anymore...
...By comparison, Munro's adults are innocents...
...There was a problem for her with Senator McCarthy- [Alfrida] would have liked to be on his side, but his being a Catholic was a stumbling block...
...Family Furnishings" is also a typically deceptive stylistic performance from Munro...
...But inevitably, the drama of love, mortality, and human entanglement trump such formal matters...
...Her deft manipulation of past and present tense, of narrative voice, as well as her exploration of the writer's role in society, put her postmodern credentials on display...
...This awkward dalliance captures one widow's ambivalence toward not only her departed husband, but also the rituals of death...
...After DeLillo, the living author I most admire is [Alice] Munro," Franzen told the New York Times Magazine...
...Dressing in a shop for a fateful trip, she rues the store mirrors, positioned "so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies right away...
...Instead her boys and girls display formidable candor and abandon...
...They stumble on a game of war, in which girls must be nurses and boys combatants...
...And yet, this story's last line is so powerful it affirms Munro's ability to capture an entire life, not merely on a single page, as is often said of her, but in a single sentence...
...How can one reconcile Don DeLillo's sweeping intercontinental tomes with Munro's exquisite portraits of confused Canadians...
...As if sex, men, women, religion, politics-all the stuff of Munro's fiction-is not "heady" material...
...This doomed pairing becomes a keen meditation on marriage itself, as Munro captures some of the base needs which lead to lifelong bonds: fear, helplessness, financial ruin...
...Munro always breathes new life into this seemingly old-fashioned conflict...
...Talk about a backhanded compliment...
...Take the endlessly plundered topic of gender, on which no author is quite as illuminating...
...She could not be more wrong...
...The story is equal to anything Philip Roth could come up with on these favored topics of his-trading, of course, Roth's trademark speechifying for Munro's stunning, omniscient empathy...
...Suddenly they are eight again, wading down a river, out of the country and into "town...
...In "Comfort," a school science teacher (and ardent atheist) is the target of Protestant fundamentalists...
...Family Furnishings," for example, tracks a bold "career girl" named Al-frida, and a younger, aspiring writer, from the end of World War I to the 1960s...
...If there is one problem with Munro it is that, perhaps because of their length, her stories sprawl, lacking a central focus...
...When the "Nettles" boy and girl awkwardly meet again, after marriage, children (one gruesomely dead), and the writings of Simone de Beauvoir have left them still yearning, we know to expect neither romance nor anger, but sadly, simply, "love that was not usable, that knew its place...
...Disease and death have a particularly prominent role in this collection, Munro's tenth...
...Post and Beam" similarly offers an insightful, but never quite outstanding, look at the burdens of family...
...Or could she...
...That so many Munro characters (especially the women) have intellectual leanings also gives her stories strong social resonance...
...So if Munro and her sales suffer because of her stubborn passion for Canada's simmering interior life, so be it...
...Thanks to two unwittingly cruel children, Johanna believes her trip to see a feckless, ill young man will result in marriage...
...From the passionately sexual to the coldly biological, Munro ingeniously offers fresh, disturbing perspectives on how men and women see (and smell and touch) each other...
...Against such gender typing, Munro's characters do not fight, or rage, or cynically crack wise...
...We get no cliches here about conformity and liberation...
...When Mike was wounded he never opened his eyes, he lay limp and still while I pressed the slimy large leaves to his forehead and throat and-pulling out his shirt-to his pale, tender stomach...
...Her men, whether detached or abusive, invariably shy away from intimacy, especially at its most basic level...
...One male character, a professor, "had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus," while another "hates being reminded" of his wife's monthly period...
...LIFE IN A SENTENCE Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Alice Munro Tom Deignan On the halcyon days before he became Oprah Winfrey's sparring partner, National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen made a fascinating admission...
...The title story is practically a novella, a portrait of Johanna, one of Munro's most vulnerable characters...
...Why should Munro bother looking beyond small-town Canada when she has conjured such diverse species of the human animal from its lush, rugged landscape...
...Yet that's background noise to the disease which is ravaging this dogmatic educator, and to his wife's relationship with an undertaker...
...Call it cynical or convenient, but Munro does not suggest that the satisfaction of such needs is necessarily a bad thing...
...Nobody ever has written stories quite like Alice Munro's...
...Tom Deignan is an editor and columnist at the Irish Voice in New York City.e in New York City...
...To the young narrator, "It was such a joy to be part of a large and desperate enterprise, and to be singled out within it, to be essentially pledged to one fighter...
...She is fascinated, for example, by the smell of men-"their work clothes and tools and tobacco and mucky boots and sour-cheese socks...
...Munro's pursuit of such, well, grave matters does not come at the expense of more mundane, elemental observations...
...She called the pope the poop," Munro slyly writes...
...But in the case of this collection's "Floating Bridge," the story seems built mainly around a touching concluding scene...
...Nettles," from this latest collection, begins with a woman meeting a man from her past...
...A more explicit portrait of the rocky married life is "The Bear Came over the Mountain," in which a post-1960s husband and wife confront physical decay...
Vol. 129 • February 2002 • No. 4
