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Journalism of Courage
Too much happiness? If anything,the characters in these ten stories by Alice Munro have too little. In Dimensions,the terrifying and powerful first story,Doree works as a chambermaid at an inn,scrubbing bathrooms,making beds,wiping mirrors,glad that her work gives her little time to thinkbecause she cannot think about the things she has lost. Deep-Holes begins with a man and a woman taking their children for a picnic. One of the boys falls into a hole in the rocks and is rescued just in time by his father. Years later,when the children have grown up and gone away,the woman reflects on the unknown depths to which they can fall,with no possibility of rescue.
Most of the stories are set in the rural Canadian landscape that appears so frequently in Munros stories. In Wood,about a man obsessed with cutting wood,the forest itself plays a central part in the narrative as the source of the deepest and the most mysterious longings. Skillfully detailed,taut with feeling,and bleakly compassionate in their truthfulness,the stories are about the conflicts of womens lives. The desire for freedom but also,as a young girl watches three women struggle over a dying man,for control. The desire for a life of a mind or sometimes-as in the story about an elderly woman confronting an intruderjust for life itself.
In Fiction,Joyce meets someone she used to know decades ago,when that person was a child,and discovers how much she,Joyce,had meant to the child without realising it. That person has now grown up and published a book of fiction. Munro,who is arguably the best living writer of the short story,has a little chuckle at this point about the popular status of the short story vis-a-vis the novel: How Are We to Live is the books title. A collection of short stories,not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the books authority,making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature,rather than safely settled inside.
Joyce,discovering elements of herself in one of the stories,wonders if the writers intention is to extract some form of revenge. Joyce had used the child for her own purpose; will the child now use her? But then she discovers that this is not soor at least,not as she fears. For as Munros stories have always shown us,the way of fiction is necessarily indirect. It takes the stuff of lifes experiences,yearnings and sadness and all,and goes somewhere else altogether. Too Much Happiness is a rich and powerful collection from one of the most important writers of English fiction of our time.
