I don’t know what prompted my mother to show up with an armful of Alice Munro books one visit. There are at least seven standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the teak bookcase in the living room. From the penciled prices on the inside cover one can surmise that these were purchased across several used book shops. There was a hunt involved in this curation.
The Canadian writer had received a prize or an award (one of many). It was most likely the Nobel Prize in Literature. Now presented with a starter kit of her work, I felt obliged to dig in and read through them. And I tried. Several times. But man, she talks about adultery as if the characters reside in two apartments rather than one. At one moment I’m over here, now I’m over there. It’s it a fairweather day, n’est pas?
Yet when trajedy strikes, a big beam of light is shown on the hurt and meaness and dismay all jostling about between the pages. I’ve known others to be fascinated with gore. They’ll interrupt the flow of conversation to inquiry whether you heard about the toursit who was mauled by a grizzly. “Can you imagine?” and in questioning drawing your mind to do exactly that. “Walking along in the stunning Rockies one moment and then batted about by a three hundred pound beast. Can you imagine?”
Munro’s writing is like that for me. She dwells in the bleak interactions of unhappy people. She’s intent on bringing her readers to trajedy’s door and then have them be torn in two by betrayal or blistered from disappointment.
But here’s why you should revisit a writer who once didn’t suit you. Because now I know her plan. So I can scroll through the tumbling words, at the ready to deflect the hurtful human behavior; I can appreciate how she strings those words, and phrases, peppered with timely punctuation, into a lovely text.
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