In Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (I always feel like the question mark is wrong, as it’s an accusation and not a question), Rose recovers from the birth of her first child in a maternity ward, where one woman dominates the conversation about how her kitchen shelves are arranged. In a sea of lactating, bleeding female bodies, with the babies whisked off to the nursery except for brief periods, Rose is alienated. But she spots Jocelyn, a kindred spirit, who is reading a book instead of a gossip magazine. They create a twosome who not-so-subtly mock the other women, using phrases beginning with “I’m no prude but . . .”
Christian Lorentzen, writing over a decade ago for the London Review of Books about Munro’s Dear Life, mentions that moment and that phrase. It’s a snarky piece (“Reading ten of her collections in a row has induced in me not a glow of admiration but a state of mental torpor that spread into the rest of my life. I became sad, like her characters, and like them I got sadder”), but it’s weirdly insightful. Lorentzen considers whether his reading responses might be mere misogyny, but he works his way through to a conclusion that’s worthy of grappling with–Munro does the same thing over and over, and while she does it deftly, it’s not that interesting a thing to do. To wit:
“It might be too much to call her an anti-modernist, rather than someone on whom modernism didn’t leave much of an impression, but her conventionality–a writer ‘of the old school’ in Anne Tyler’s phrase–won’t quite do. For her admirers it needs to be offset by some kind of innovation. They usually point to her manipulation of time–her tic of adding a coda to a story, marked usually by the words ‘years later’–as if she were the Doctor Who of upmarket short story writing.”
Well, that’s pretty funny and awfully apt. And it occurs to me that “Coda” might be the right title for an academic piece I’m working on, about Munro and murder. Except it’s been used, of course, by Nathalie Foy: “‘Darkness collecting’: Reading ‘Vandals’ as a coda to Open Secrets.” A very smart piece that I’ve recently returned to as I craft my own article, which looks at Munro’s grisly story about child murder, “Dimensions.”
I’m a fond and appreciative reader (closer to Byatt’s perspective, as cited in his article, than Lorentzen’s) and so I’m not sure “tic” is a fair assessment. Munro handles time in an intriguing way. She attenuates some moments, like the scene in WDYTYA? where Rose experiences the “royal beating”, arguably one of Munro’s most powerful passages. Nathalie Foy is clearly on my mind today, but she provided an extraordinary reading of this story for my second-year Can Lit survey course at U of T. Including the idea of being an “ear witness”, one who hears/overhears but doesn’t see. I haven’t come across it as a published article, which is a pity, because it’s a helpful concept.
Then there’s the inverse of this attenuation, Munro’s often abrupt telescoping or compression of time. We see a character again, years later, or even decades. The dramatic event of the past has been assimilated into their personal history, in such a manner that it’s now bearable. Sometimes that requires partial forgetting, as in a story I wrote about a week or so ago, “Open Secrets.” Sometimes it requires a sense of humour. But always, that relationship between the past and present self is crucial in Munro.
Many of her female protagonists’ memories are about love affairs. For Munro, love is the grand project of a woman’s life. I’m reminded of Tolstoy (which rarely happens) and I don’t know what Munro thought of, say, Anna Karenina. I imagine that with her extensive, occasionally exhausting focus on adultery, she must have done some thinking about the portrayal of the adulteress. Does Munro write about love? Poignantly, I think she writes about its failures, the “progress of love” that doesn’t reach the goal. Though I may be retconning, or committing a biographical fallacy.
But think of all the failed loves in Munro, like in the story “Mischief” with the maternity ward scene. Unsurprisingly, this story is less about becoming a mother than about an attempt at adultery. Rose is eventually drawn to Jocelyn’s husband Clifford, a symphony musician, during a party at their home where Rose’s husband embarrasses her if not himself. Patrick says derogatory things about Indigenous people; he seems officious and out-of-date compared to the clever, ironic, political chat of the slightly younger crowd. Rose, humiliated, is comforted by Clifford and they begin to plan a never-consummated affair. Years later (ahem), there’s a threesome.
That’s the kind of moment that got Munro into trouble, for her portrayals of sex, and the censorious sense (especially in her hometown of Wingham) that there was something pornographic about her work. There really isn’t. She never, in my reading experience, seeks to titillate. I would not put a Munro story in a collection of erotic Canadian fiction, and I would think carefully before anthologizing her alongside writers about love. There is a fascinating and disquieting element to her portrayals of doomed romance. The way she conceives of characters not as integrated people, but as an accumulation of memories and experiences that don’t quite gel.
One last example, because it’s the next work I’m tackling: Munro’s story “Fiction.” Uncharacteristically, it first appeared in Harper’s rather than The New Yorker. Every time I go to look up the story, I can’t locate it in my files or on the internet. Searching for “Alice Munro” AND “fiction” . . . you see the problem. I wonder if that was deliberate? Because this is a story about a woman who fears the revelation, in print, that a young woman was abused as a child by the older character’s partner. More soon, but read the story if you haven’t. I always locate it in the end by adding the key word “Buxtehude”, as my mother was a church organist. It’s in Too Much Happiness if you can’t find it online, which I can’t, at the moment.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
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