She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.” This line from W.B. Yeats comes to mind whenever I read reviews of Alice Munro's work. It is great to see people agreeing with you. It is very moving to see the gestures of admiration and respect afforded to Munro from committees and gatherings of the great and the good. She was recently awarded the third-ever Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. She will be honoured by fellow writers, including Alistair McLeod and Richard Ford, at the Vancouver International Writers Festival in October. Her star has never been higher.
But there is a hesitation in the silence at the end of Yeats's line, an intimation that praise, though appropriate, might be also beside the point. There is a part of me that listens to the response Munro's work now elicits and says, “Would everyone be quiet a minute, and read.”
Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro, McClelland & Stewart/Douglas Gibson, 303 pages, $32.99
Perhaps I am jealous, in the old-fashioned, Old Testament, sense of the word. I want to keep this work, that has kept me company all my writing life, close to my own heart.
And though it is great to see Munro's reputation reach new heights, we have to remember that her work begs a larger point about reputation itself; about how we break and remake the literary canon. If her stories prove anything, it is that the whole idea of “importance” means very little in the relationship between the good writer and the good reader.
Most importantly, these stories are not asking for our praise, they ask for our attention. They are not written for the crowd, but for the individual reader. They don't ask for noise, but for silence – and not an awed silence at that (though awe is certainly possible), but the silence that happens when you close a book and pause and continue with your life, less lonely than you were before.
Munro's work famously resists the critics. Some say that this is because she writes about life itself, unmediated by literary technique or pretension, but actually there are many different ways of writing about “life itself.” The sense of transparency comes not just from the clarity of her prose, but also from the fact that Munro's characters belong to communities, where certain things are known and other things are not known. The stories have the feel of talk; their shape comes from a sense of “the way life goes,” about how a character turns out, or who turns up.
This kind of story-making requires continuity and stability, and though you might think this could not happen, or happen so well, in any country other than Canada, you might also say that the stories create their own stable worlds. The women characters make relationships and families, the way women do; they also make themselves, and they learn lessons along the way about the success and limits of their labours.
Memory is a great and moral tool for this writer, the way it allows our past to be freshly revealed to us by events in the present
