Last Reads

Alice Munro says this may be her last book. It reminds us how great the loss could be.

In 8220;home8221;, one of the stories in her new collection The View from Castle Rock, the narrator writes about a visit to her father8217;s house when she accompanies him to the hospital. Her mother is dead, her father has remarried, and the family home, after partial renovations, has changed a great deal from what it was like in her childhood. 8220;We follow slowly that old, usual route 8212; Spencer Street, Church Street, Wexford Street, Ladysmith Street 8212; to the hospital. The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same 8212; nobody is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up. Here are more or less the same banks and hardware and grocery stores and the barbershop and the Town Hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages for me have drained away.8221;

One reads this with a pang. Not only for the daughter who looks around at the small town of her growing years, but also for ourselves, as readers of one of the greatest living fiction writers, and for the realisation that this is possibly Alice Munro8217;s last book. For last year, aged 75, Munro announced that she had used up all her material, that she had nothing left to say, and that she was therefore going to stop writing.

Her new collection, written at the peak of her creative powers, only reminds us of how great the loss will be. The View from Castle Rock brings together 12 interconnected short stories in two parts titled 8220;No Advantages8221; and 8220;Home8221;.

In the foreword, Munro describes how the stories came about. Tracing the history of one side of her family back to the Ettrick Valley of Scotland 8212; a place describes in an eighteenth century account as having 8220;no advantages8221;, she finds that every generation of the Laidlaw family seemed to produce at least one writer of 8220;long, outspoken, sometimes outrageous letters8221;.

After a drinking session at the pub, her great-great-great-grandfather James Laidlaw, a cousin of the 8220;Ettrick Shepherd8221;, the poet James Hogg, leads a little group of followers into Edinburgh Castle 8220;these stones have run with blood,8221; Laidlaw tells his son and up Castle Rock, from where they look out at America. Or what they think is America, and what the boy later realises is actually Fife.

Drawing from these letters and accounts, Munro fills in the gaps with her own vivid narrative. Dreaming their dreams but living an austere reality, the Laidlaws set forth for a new world. A baby is born, a man dies, a child is nearly lost and then found, and then lost again forever; odd marriages and yet oddly human relationships are formed; life is made up of hard work, set routines, and long, sometimes implacable silences.

And then suddenly we are in the second part of the book, 8220;Home8221;, which Munro has described in the foreword as 8220;closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person8230; I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could.8221; We are told about her father8217;s fur-trapping, her mother8217;s sales acumen, her grandmother8217;s disapproval; and also about her first betrayal by a boyfriend: 8220;It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers.8221;

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And that is the real memoir contained inside this wonderful collection the tale of a young girl discovering a new world for herself and a new journey that she must now undertake. A journey that will lead her to make, out of the ordinary material of real life, a new generation of stories that are in every way extraordinary.