Dear Life
January 2013
Alice Munro / Chatto & Windus
In a Paris Review interview of nearly two decades ago, Alice Munro claimed that her early writing career had used up her childhood memories. Then The View from Castle Rock appeared in 2006, an interplay between ancient family history, fiction and memoir. Now, at the formidable age of 81, Dear Life’s ‘Finale’ acts as an addendum; an autobiographical quartet of fragments that reveal the emotional and geographical terrain of her childhood’s sometimes stark reality, a domineering then ailing mother, differences of ambition and feeling that set her apart from her rural peers. Even so, Munro is the antithesis of the egoistic writer. Although spokesperson of the dislocated and the marginalised—by gender, indigence or experience—she has never sought out or laid claim to this mantle. Parallels deepen between her work and that of another short story doyen, Janette Turner Hospital, and there is something in ‘Finale’s form, the last movement in this literary concerto, that is akin to Patti Smith’s Woolgathering, another strange, almost transcendental rumination of a rural upbringing.
But first we are thrust into the world of fiction; ten stories, largely fecund with Munro’s elegant and earthly cadences and masterful observations which make her both of the people and somehow removed from them. The Canada she portrays is one of frontiers that threaten to overwhelm. Physical ones, as in the solitude of a school in the woods (‘Amundsen’) or the snow filled countryside plain where a wolf appears as if an omen of the greater danger to come (‘Gravel’), appear alongside privately constructed frontiers of a World War II veteran (‘Train’) and socially constructed frontiers (‘To Reach Japan’).
The history of the last century is evident as is the sense of being in a time but not belonging to it, of being denied passport by virtue of gender—society’s expectations are at a disjuncture with some of these women’s inner lives—or in the case of the fictional writers within, a sensibility of style that has been supplanted by another. Religion, both its oppressiveness and its unravelling, is present but faith and faithlessness are at the heart of most actions, sometimes devastating (‘Train’ and ‘Corrie’) but never overplayed. The writing slips from measured to a striking sensuality of prose, ‘I took to folding myself in, with a velvet stillness’ (‘Amundsen’), ‘That was where the word poetess came in handy, like a web of spun sugar’ (‘To Reach Japan’).
The narrator of ‘Gravel’, someone who eschews bitterness for all their entitlement, cannily observes, ‘All the eviscerating that is done in families these days strikes me as a mistake.’ This statement would sound apposite emerging from Munro herself for her memoir contains a residing acceptance at variance with rather more contemporary positions of angst or self-flagellation. The word stoic is perhaps associated too easily with conservatism and her commitment to truth telling and addressing of subjects have been anything but: mothers and single women having affairs, taboos of incest and suicide pacts, albeit not undertaken. And all of this without a whiff of gratuitousness. Life is to be grasped at, as the title suggests. What might have been a time of gloaming for Munro is one of continued intensity. I hope it is not too greedy to want more.
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