Le Salon, September 14, 1986
Characters Dangerously Like
Us
By JOYCE CAROL OATES
Storytelling is shaped
by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses - one toward brevity, compactness,
artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment. The
one, practiced most scrupulously, yields ever briefer and ever more abstract or
parablelike fictions; the other, of course, yields the novel or the epic. Some
storytellers experiment endlessly while others, having found their voices early
on, and having developed (or appropriated) the most pragmatic structures to
contain them, are content to work in more or less the same tradition throughout
their careers. When the work is good no one is likely to lament the writer's
lack of interest in experimentation. When the work is very good no one is
likely even to notice it.
Like her similarly
gifted contemporaries Peter Taylor, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien and some few
others, the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro writes stories that have
the density - moral, emotional, sometimes historical - of other writers'
novels. As remote from the techniques and ambitions of what is currently known
as ''minimalist'' fiction as it is possible to get and still inhabit the same
genre, these writers give us fictitious worlds that are mimetic paradigms of
utterly real worlds yet are fictions, composed with so assured an art that it
might be mistaken for artlessness. They give voice to the voices of their
regions, filtering the natural rhythms of speech through a more refined (but
not obtrusively refined) writerly speech. They are faithful to the contours of
local legend, tall tales, anecdotes, family reminiscences; their material is
nearly always realistic - ''Realism'' being that convention among competing
others that swept all before it in the mid and late 19th century - and their
characters behave, generally, like real people. That is, they surprise us at
every turn, without violating probability. They so resemble ourselves that
reading about them, at times, is emotionally risky. Esthetically experimental
literature, while evoking our admiration, rarely moves us the way this sort of
literature moves us.
From the start of her
career in 1968 with the Canadian publication of the short-story collection
''Dance of the Happy Shades'' (published in the United States in 1973) through
''Lives of Girls and Women,'' ''Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You,''
''The Beggar Maid,'' ''The Moons of Jupiter'' and this new collection, ''The
Progress of Love,'' Alice Munro has concentrated on short fiction that explores
the lives of fairly undistinguished men and women - but particularly women -who
live in southwestern rural Ontario. When her characters move elsewhere to live,
to British Columbia, for instance, like the couple whose precarious marriage is
explored in ''Miles City, Montana,'' it is still Ontario that is home. (But:
''When we said 'home' and meant Ontario, we had very different places in
mind.'') Though Ms. Munro's tonal palette has darkened considerably over the
last 20 years, her fictional technique has not changed greatly, nor has the
range of her characters. By degrees, of course, they have grown older. Their
living fulfills the prophetic conclusion of a beautiful early story, ''Walker
Brothers Cowboy'' (from ''Dance of the Happy Shades''): ''I feel my father's
life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and
turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it
kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it,
once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of
weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.''
The most powerful of
the 11 stories collected in ''The Progress of Love'' take on bluntly and
without sentiment the themes of mortality, self-delusion, puzzlement over the
inexplicable ways of fate. In ''Fits'' it is observed that ''people can take a
fit like the earth takes a fit'' after an unaccountable murder-suicide has been
discovered in a small rural town. (Indeed, ''Fits'' would have made an
excellent title for this collection.) The story yields its secrets slowly, with
admirable craft and suspense: the surprise for the reader is that the ''fit''
at its core is less the sensational act of violence than a woman's mysteriously
untroubled response to it.
''A Queer Streak'' is
a tragically comic (or comically tragic) tale of an ambitious young woman named
Violet, a ''holy terror'' in her youth, whose life is permanently altered by
the bizarre behavior of an emotionally unbalanced younger sister. It is a
familiar temptation to which Violet succumbs: she decides, against the very
grain of her personality, that the loss of her fiance is a ''golden
opportunity'' and not a disaster. Henceforth she will give up her own life,
live for others: ''That was the way Violet saw to leave her pain behind. A
weight gone off her. If she would bow down and leave her old self behind as
well, and all her ideas of what her life should be, the weight, the pain, the
humiliation would all go magically. And she could still be chosen. . . . If she
prayed enough and tried enough, that would be possible.'' But this moment of
revelation is the high point of Violet's life, as we see it.
Violet, who takes on,
by degrees, the ''queer streak'' of her family, is one of Ms. Munro's
unromantic, independent heroines - country bred, proud, resilient, courageous
even in her old age. Her story might have been even more moving if it did not
unaccountably accelerate in its second half (where the point of view shifts to
Violet's cousin Dan about whom we know virtually nothing and who is merely used
as an instrument to observe Violet). Also, Ms. Munro is curiously perfunctory
in summarizing Violet's love affair with a married man - the most intense
emotional experience of Violet's life, presumably. Like the adulterous love
affair at the heart of ''White Dump,'' it is alluded to rather than dramatized:
the reader knows very little about it, and consequently feels very little.
RECURRING in Alice
Munro's fiction is a certain female protagonist, clearly kin to Violet, but
generally more capable of establishing a life for herself. She is intelligent,
though not intellectual; ''superior,'' though often self-doubting. She has the
capacity to extract from frequently sordid experiences moral insights of a very
nearly Jamesian subtlety and precision. She tells us what she thinks; tells us,
often, what we would think. Not conventionally beautiful, she is nonetheless
attractive to men: which leads her sometimes, as an adolescent, into dangerous
situations - as in the new story ''Jesse and Meribeth'' in which the adolescent
Jesse is scolded by a near-seducer, an older man, for what he correctly
perceives as her overwrought romantic imagination: ''You shouldn't go inside
places like this with men just because they ask you. . . . You're hot-blooded.
You've got some lessons to learn.'' In the more complex, multigenerational
''White Dump'' a kindred girl is drawn into marriage with a man who ''depended
on her to make him a man,'' and who will prove inadequate to her passionate
nature. In ''Lichen,'' one of the bleakest of the new stories, the heroine,
middle-aged, cheerful, at last adjusted to a solitary life, achieves a moral
triumph over her fatuous ex-husband simply by maturing beyond him. She is fully
accepting of the terms of her freedom: ''This white-haired woman walking beside
him . . . dragged so much weight with her - a weight not just of his sexual
secrets Continued on page 9 but of his middle-of-the-night speculations about
God, his psychosomatic chest pains, his digestive sensitivity, his escape
plans, which once included her. . . . All his ordinary and extraordinary life -
even some things it was unlikely she knew about - seemed stored up in her. He
could never feel any lightness, any secret and victorious expansion, with a
woman who knew so much. She was bloated with all she knew.'' She has become,
ironically, a kind of mother to him; but she looks so much older than he that
he is shamed and frightened at the very sight of her.
In one of the
collection's finest stories, ''The Progress of Love,'' the daughter of a woman
who sacrificed both herself and her children to presumably Christian ideals of
integrity chooses deliberately not to believe in those ideals, or to marry
conventionally as her mother had done; she becomes, in fact, a real estate
agent, selling off the old houses and farms that made up the world of her
youth. Long divorced, alone but not really lonely, Euphemia - who calls herself
Fame -seeks moments of ''kindness and reconciliation'' rather than serious
love; she wonders ''if those moments aren't more valued, and deliberately gone
after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in those
old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused
and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.'' But without the old
marriages and all that they yielded of sorrow, repression, loss, romance - what
remains? Fame's love affairs are affairs merely, matters of convenience. To
celebrate birthdays ''or other big events'' she goes with friends from work to
a place called the Hideaway where male strippers perform. (While Ms. Munro's
Ontario countryside has come to bear a disconcerting resemblance to Andrew
Wyeth's stark, bleached-out, clinically detailed landscapes, her small towns
have been tawdrily transformed - dignified old country inns recycled as strip
joints, convenience stores stocked with video games: ''jittery electronic noise
and flashing light and menacing, modern-day, oddly shaved and painted
children.'')
More than ''The
Beggar Maid'' and ''The Moons of Jupiter,'' the two story collections preceding
this one, ''The Progress of Love'' does contain less fully realized stories. So
thinly executed is ''Eskimo'' that it reads like an early draft of a typically
rich, layered, provocative Munro story: its male protagonist is offstage, its
female protagonist senses, or imagines, a psychic kinship with a young Eskimo
girl she tries to befriend on an airplane flight, but their encounter comes to
nothing and the story dissolves in a self-consciously symbolic dream. ''Miles
City, Montana'' recounts a child's near-drowning but fails to integrate the
episode with what precedes and follows it, and ends with a rather forced
epiphany: ''So we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because
of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time, for everything
that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever was
flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous - all our natural, and particular,
mistakes.'' ''Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux'' and ''Circle of Prayer'' are each
rather sketchily imagined, though brimming with life; and ''White Dump,''
potentially one of the strongest stories in the collection, suffers from a
self-conscious structure in which time is fashionably broken and point of view
shifts with disconcerting casualness from character to character. We catch only
a glimpse of Isabel and her lover and must take Isabel's word for it, that she
feels ''rescued, lifted, beheld, and safe''; we are not even certain whether
the author means her conviction to be serious, or self-deluded. And the image
of the ''white dump'' - the biscuit factory sugar dump - is rather arbitrarily
spliced onto the story, poetically vivid as it is.
EVEN the weaker
stories, however, contain passages of genuinely inspired prose and yield the
solid pleasures of a three-dimensional world that has been respectfully, if not
always lovingly, recorded. And Ms. Munro's minor characters, though fleetingly
glimpsed, are frequently the vehicles for others' gestures of compassion and
pity. (As in ''The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink,'' where decades are
compressed within the space of a few pages, and Edgar, whom we have seen as a
bright, attractive boy of 17, emerges as an elderly stroke victim, seated in
front of a television screen, indifferent to the visit of his cousin and to his
cousin's offer to take him for a walk. His wife says of him, simply: ''No. He's
happy.'') ''The Progress of Love' is a volume of unflinching honesty,
uncompromising in its dissection of the ways we deceive ourselves in the name
of love; the bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author's exquisite eye
and ear for detail. Life is heartbreak, but it is also uncharted moments of
kindness and reconciliation.
Joyce
Carol Oates's most recent book is the story collection ''Raven's Wing.''
'I KNOW
WHERE THE ROPE IS ATTACHED'
Time is layered in
Alice Munro's latest stories - present narrative is interwoven with
reminiscence, and the stories consistently beckon to past selves and past
experiences. ''I'm very interested in the present, in the culture as it is
right now, but I always want to tie it in to what I remember,'' the 55-year-old
Canadian writer said recently. ''Anyone my age has seen a lot of change in
social attitudes, in the fabric of the culture that surrounds people's lives.
I'm interested in how that affects people, I want to skip around in time.''
Ms. Munro has been
less inclined to skip around in space. Although she has played the role of
''suburban housewife'' in Vancouver, managed a bookstore in Victoria with her
former husband and taught writing at universities in Western Ontario, British
Columbia and Queensland, Australia, she has returned to live in the rural
Ontario of her childhood - as she usually does in her writing. Her latest
collection, ''The Progress of Love,'' is no exception. ''I have a very deep
feeling for the countryside, and I write a lot about the sort of people who
live in this area - people away from the mainstream,'' she said by telephone
from Ontario.
Ms. Munro doesn't
choose her subjects, she explained, they choose her.
Perhaps the same
could be said of her genre. ''I never intended to be a short-story writer. I
planned to write a few short stories to practice writing, and then write
novels.'' One novel (''Lives of Girls and Women,'' really a collection of
linked stories) and four short-story collections later, she admits she is not a
novelist at heart.
''I can get a kind of
tension when I'm writing a short story, like I'm pulling on a rope and I know
where the rope is attached. With a novel, everything goes flabby. I like to
have things going on at a lot of levels and I don't know how to do a novel in
that way.''
-- Lori Miller
