Dear Life : Stories

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle--
And hoping
It will reach Japan.

What a conundrum -- how to rate Dear Life? I am a long time fan of Alice Munro -- though I'll admit I didn't pick up this latest (to be her last?) book until she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature -- and while I don't think this is her strongest collection, she's still a better writer than just about everybody else out there. So, do I rate her against herself or against the everybody else? 

There's a special alchemy to the way Munro crafts a short story -- filling it with detailed reminiscences, with the occasional "I think it was that way" or "I may be remembering this wrong but…", every word having the ring of truth, and just when the reader thinks "Aha, I know exactly who this character is", some detail is revealed that changes everything. That this can be the case so often without it ever feeling tricky is a testament to Munro's craft, her ability to capture truth: Don't we all present a public face -- even to the people who know us best -- one that would be (dangerously?) illuminated if we were to reveal those private, seminal moments that shaped and haunt us?

I won't review these stories individually, but just pick a few on which to comment. Train is one story that perfectly illustrates what I mean by Munro's slow revelation of character. As I was reading it -- the story of a soldier returning from WWII who decides to jump off the train that's carrying him home, ready to start a new life wherever he lands -- my thought process was: "Okay…all right…huh…oh…oh, okay…ohhhhhhh". That's the process with so many of her stories: Not O Henry gotcha endings, but an incremental revelation. Such magic.

Another great gift of Munro is her scene setting, as the beginning to Leaving Maverley illustrates:

In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town there was one in this town, too, in Maverley, and it was called the Capital, as such theatres often were. Morgan Holly was the owner and the projectionist. He didn't like dealing with the public -- he preferred to sit in his upstairs cubbyhole managing the story on the screen -- so naturally he was annoyed when the girl who took the tickets told him that she was going to have to quit, because she was having a baby. He might have expected this -- she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show -- but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.

If I took a notion to writing short stories, I wouldn't know how to do this -- the girl who takes the tickets doesn't come up in the story again and even the owner/projectionist is soon out of the picture. And yet, by starting with the two of them, we have an idea of time and place that might not have been obvious or subtle enough if the story started with the main characters -- such a witchy kind of alchemy, totally beyond my understanding. Leaving Maverley also contained one of my favourite descriptions -- that of a woman lingering on her deathbed -- that I'll include: She had changed from a very thin woman not to a child but to an ungainly and ill-assorted collection of bones, with a birdlike crest, ready to die every minute with the erratic shaping of her breath.

To Reach Japan had the feel of a Margaret Laurence story (another of my most cherished Canadian authors). Greta could have been Stacey MacAindra (from The Fire-Dwellers), losing control after one too many Pimm's No.1 with pink grapefruit juice, regretting wearing the smart dress that's just a bit too tight in the hips, wondering if she should be offended when a strange man decides against kissing her. The following could also have been said by Stacey (or Morag or Rachel):

It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not. You might say, well, feminism was not. But then you would have to explain that feminism was not even a word people used. Then you would get all tied up saying that having any serious idea, let alone ambition, or maybe even reading a real book, could be seen as suspect, having something to do with your child's pneumonia, and a political remark at an office party might have cost your husband his promotion. It would not have mattered which political party either. It was a woman's shooting off her mouth that did it.
People would laugh and say, Oh surely you are joking, and you would have to say, Well, but not that much.

I have the benefit of living in a sort of post-feminist world -- one where the notions of women's lib marches and bra burning seem vaguely embarrassing and unnecessary -- but I'm only just barely too young for these movements, and applaud stories that remind us of what our Western world was like in such recent memory. Related to this, in Haven, Uncle Jasper returns home one evening and finds the new neighbours and a chamber group, including his estranged sister, enjoying an impromptu concert in his home. He proceeds to the kitchen and after some banging and scraping noises, returns with a plate of pork and beans which he eats, standing, his winter coat still on, with contempt and vulgar manners until the group awkwardly leaves. As if in apology the next morning, Aunt Dawn says to the young protagonist, "A man's home is his castle." I can so see my own father having done that, and my mother trying to explain after the fact, so maybe that reveals why both Laurence and Munro seem to speak to me.

The final four stories in Dear Life are described by Munro as "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact". They do feel different from the rest of the collection: Perhaps because each story proceeds linearly instead of containing those late story reminiscences that serve to throw typical Munro characters into new light. There are seminal childhood moments revealed in these stories, but they don't demonstrate how they affect the protagonist in later life -- unless, of course, you take them to be straightforward autobiographical experiences and Alice Munro's entire canon is proof of how they affected her. She seems to have a particular fixation on: sidewalks (and what it says about your status if your home has them out front); sausage curls; Sunday School recitations; and her mother's driving, its "nervous solemnity". One of my favourite quotes about her mother:

With her everything was clear and ringing and served to call attention. Now that was happening and I heard her laugh, delightedly, as if to make up for nobody's talking to her.

With that, I can imagine how the young girl cringed to have her mother behaving so awkwardly, never quite right in public, but I also felt such compassion for the mother who couldn't find her place. Dear Life is full of these moments of truth, of situations I could relate to even if they aren't my own experiences.

So how to rate this book? Alice Munro, now in her eighties and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has many collections of short stories that I would give five stars to, and so I will need to hold her to the very highest of standards. The four stars I'm giving to Dear Life only reflects how this stands up against her previous works, a formidable bar by which to judge anyone.

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle--
And hoping
It will reach Japan.

I like that small poem from To Reach Japan, for itself, but also because it reminded me of A Tale for the Time Being: In that novel, a young girl in Japan puts her note in a bottle -- or, rather, diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox -- and flings it into the sea (presumably), hoping to connect to a time being; whoever might find and read her message; to make a connection with the future. In Dear Life, Alice Munro has created a work to which I connected -- across time and space -- and which leaves a legacy to be discovered by the future. I think her notes will make it to Japan.