The author Alice Munro has died. She was 92.
Through her life, Munro wrote short stories. Some were very long, some seeped into other stories and some just stood, lonesome. Most had women in them. And in most, women went about their business, making the home, cleaning the furniture, cooking the food, being a part of the political churn, milking the cows, wearing the clothes, bearing children, working at jobs, forging unlikely friendships with their stepdaughters, battling disease, trying to marry, trying to accept themselves as married women, rekindling love, and accepting it all, just endlessly going about it all. Things took place in rural Canada, where the barrenness was another friend to the women in Munro’s stories.
It is difficult to remember Munro the way you remember any other novelist or an essayist. So enormous is the experience of her stories, and at once so gentle, that they become part of life. While nary a day passes when I don’t think of the woman trying on a dress before travelling to rural Canada to marry a man who does not know her, I cannot remember the name of the story. I think of that character in The View From Castle Rock, who for the first time in her life, feels delight – upon holding a child – on the boat from Scotland to North America, but cannot remember what she was named. But when I think of the stories, I remember them viscerally – as if my own skin was feeling new fabric in the quiet changing room, or smarting from the wind of the Pacific. When young women in Munro’s stories get bullied by their classmates, it prickles similarly. The Ontario mud leading to poverty-stricken houses sticks to your feet.
I thought it was a flaw of recollection, but earlier this year, Ben Dolnick appeared to write something exactly similar in his New York Times piece on the ‘Essential Munro’:
“Her writing, once ingested, lives on in a different part of the brain than that of most writers. After 20 years of reading her and raving about her to anyone within earshot, I can recite hardly a single sentence.”
There you go.
Part of this could be because Munro’s text is not spartan, it is not wrought from a Hemingway-espoused brevity. But even with accoutrements it dwells at the heart of the matter. Perhaps therein lies its Munro-ness – her stories are forever there where the conceit is and never need to arrive at it.
Books by Alice Munro.
In a 1994 interview to Paris Review for their ‘Art of Fiction’ series, Munro said laconically that she used to send all her early work to The New Yorker, that picky behemoth. The admission is a boast now, considering that she has achieved immense formal greatness, but because it is Munro, you take it as just another line contributing to her solid honesty.
But then she says something that guides you into her general ethos:
“The New Yorker sent me nice notes though—penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging. I still remember one of them: The writing is very nice, but the theme is a bit overly familiar. It was, too. It was a romance between two aging people—an aging spinster who knows this is it for her when she’s proposed to by an aging farmer. I had a lot of aging spinsters in my stories.”
Life happens in Alice Munro’s fiction exactly like this. In the matter-of-factness of experiences, with gentle deference to the passage of time and with full respect to the smallness of the home, the largeness of watching reed sway in a breeze. There was such an unceasing acceptance of the domestic world and its importance that it is no surprise that in the last few years – at a time when Munro herself retired from public life – her work has only ballooned in significance, while disease and epidemic has forced us to find peace within four walls.
That Munro was awarded the Nobel for literature – in 2013, just after her last ever book – is most useless as a mention. It is difficult to associate stuffy honour with a writer whose work travels so consistently outside stratified literature. But the Nobel did bring her stories to a wider readership, and ensured that to the long list of epithets for them, you could also add ‘universality’.
Munro will surely be read. As long as readers need to travel into their daily selves, they will read Munro.
