She’s Ours

Runaway stories by Alice Munro.  Vintage.  335 pp.  $15.95 *****

I first heard of Alice Munro in the early eighties, when I had hooked up with my agent and first editor and they were both enthusiastic fans; my agent, Virginia Barber, was also Munro’s, and my editor, Sherry Huber, was an avid reader who constantly recommended books to me.  She suggested I start with Lives of Girls and Women, which was billed as novel-in-stories, the one time her publishers tried to make Munro salable.  The truth was that the woman wrote stories, period.  That was her form, and her genius.  I read several more of the early books, always enjoying them.  She wrote about a certain kind of transgressive woman in an utterly unapologetic way, as if to say, Here we are.  Deal with it.  She wrote about the inner lives of woman in a way that almost no one else did.  I found her fascinating.

But the years passed, and I drifted from her work.  I’ve never been a great reader of stories, even in the New Yorker, where most of hers appeared.  I always had a book going—usually a novel—and wanted to get to that in the evening, rather than reading a magazine.  Sherry Huber moved on to Audio Books.  Virginia Barber eventually lost interest in my work and dropped me as a client (after seventeen years.  It was like going through a divorce).  I continued to notice that Munro’s stories appeared in the New Yorker and came out regularly as volumes.  Then to my astonishment, in 2013, she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

I was surprised both because she was Canadian and a short story writer.  There had been rumors about other Canadians winning the Nobel—people mentioned Robertson Davies toward the end of his career—but it hadn’t happened, and I couldn’t think of another story writer who had won the prize.  I wasn’t sure I thought that early work worthy of a Nobel, as much as I liked it.  I decided to read her more recent work and see what I thought.  I have a policy (often violated) of reading at least one work by each Nobel Prize winner.

I found that in some subtle way her stories had matured.  I thought of The Lives of Girls and Woman as being about those transgressive women, usually young, doing startling and rebellious things.  The later stories focused on older protagonists, or took on the whole lives of women, and rendered them in roughly forty pages, portraying a whole life.  My impression was that each of these stories could have been a novel, but Munro squeezed the material into the shorter form.  I bought another volume, then another.  I couldn’t believe how consistently great the stories were.  The Nobel committee got it right for once.  (They missed Chekov, but they got Munro.)  I wound up reading five volumes of stories, and putting them in my Favorite Writers bookshelf.

I actually got back in touch with Virginia Barber (it had been ten years) and told her how impressed I was.  She told me that Munro had been too ill to attend the ceremonies in Stockholm, but that she had attended as her agent, and it had been a high point of her career.  I remembered meeting Ginger in 1980 when she was sharing office space with another agent, telling me that she was doing well with nonfiction books but looking for more fiction writers.[1]  Ironically, Ginger died of cancer in 2016, just three years after she’d been to Stockholm.  Munro survived until this year, when she died at age 92.

I took the occasion of her death to reread one of her books.  At the suggestion of the New York Times, I chose Runaway.

It’s amazing how the Alice Munro story became almost a genre; the first seven stories in this novel are all roughly the same length, and five were published in the New Yorker.  Three—“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”—concern a single character, who meets a future lover on a train where a tragic accident occurs; we see how that moment plays out over an entire life.  All of the first five stories are brilliant, and startling.  But the real masterpiece, I would say, is the fifth story, “Passion.”

It concerns a young woman named Grace who has a job at a restaurant of a hotel in a town named Bailey’s Falls (Canadians, I assume resonate with the names of places; I don’t know any of them).  She’s an orphan who was raised by an elderly uncle and aunt who made a living caning chairs and hoped to pass the business on to her.  At the restaurant, a young man from a large family asks her for a date—a common occurrence for the waitresses at this place—she goes out with him and then, over time, becomes his girlfriend.    Like most Munro women, she’s a little wild, looking for some action, but he’s surprisingly tame, waiting until they’re married (an event which he anticipates almost immediately).  She likes him but adores his family, especially his mother, whom she spends weekends with.  The woman lets her read freely from her library, and Grace discovers a whole world that she knew nothing about.

It seems a story of a sentimental education, someone learning about a wider world through a mentor.  But in a Munro story there’s often a sudden event that changes everything, sometimes in the last two or three pages.  It’s not quite a surprise ending—she’s not O’Henry—but it’s almost like that.  In this case it’s a long Thanksgiving afternoon with the one member of the family she hadn’t met, the mother’s son from an early marriage who has a wife and two children of his own, and works as a doctor.  Grace has cut her foot on a shell, and he arrives just in time to care, very lovingly, for her, and to take her off to the hospital.

His mother, just before they leave, whispers to Grace that she must keep him from drinking.  The man has a problem with that, and his father died of alcoholism (actually suicide).  But the man is charming, almost mesmerizing, and we realize that this is the brother Grace would really fall for (if he weren’t already married.  That doesn’t normally stop a Munro woman).  And she can’t stop him from drinking.  I’m not sure she wants to.  Things proceed from there, and get more and more surprising.

I think Munro’s entire oeuvre is worth perusing.  I’m always interested in the development of an artist, and might take her on at some point, though it’s a formidable task.  But the late stories are the great ones, and earned her the Nobel.  She is, as somebody said, our Chekhov (our meaning this part of the world?  English speakers?).  I’ll take her.

[1] She found some good ones, fiction and non-fiction alike.  Eventually she was making seven figure deals for people like Peter Mayle and Anne River Siddons, and Sherry Huber told me not to take it personally that the woman had dropped me.  When an agent hit the big time, making those multi-book deals became the creative act.  That was more interesting than bringing along a mid-list novelist.