‘Dear Life’ lacks important details
Alice Munro, who lives in Canada, is one of the best-known short story writers of our time. She has won many Canadian and English honors, the U.S. National Book Critics Award and the MacDowell Medal, and her collections have been translated into 13 languages. All of her collections are still in print, both in hardbound and paperback form.
So why couldn’t I have liked the stories in Dear Life better? Her writing is very different from the straight narrative we find in other fine authors’ short stories; much of the action in these stories takes place in a character’s head.
The people in them are often confused and take unexpected actions almost without emotion. It’s up to the reader to figure out the whys.
In one, a nine-year-old girl drowns when she throws herself, fully-dressed, into a deep gravel pit filled with water in order to retrieve the dog she has just thrown into it.
In another, a woman looking for the address of a doctor with whom she has an appointment is directed to a mental health establishment, none of whose doors open nor are there any attendants in evidence.
Another opens with a husband and wife – 84 and 71 – discussing their plans for death. Along comes a woman trying to sell her cosmetics whose company the wife finds she enjoys until by coincidence she discovers her new friend had once been her husband’s mistress.
She tears out of the house leaving all her things – wedding ring, keys, etc. She writes and sends him a very bitter letter. Thinking better of it she races back to the house, fearing it might reach him before she did – or worse, she died before it came.
In Train, there are casual situations which happen by accident, more or less without explanation. A man who has just jumped off a moving train walks across the land of a woman whose father had been killed years before, as he purposely walked toward a moving train; he spends years fixing up her broken-down house.
He gets separated from her due to various incidents after taking her to Troy for a cancer operation. Upon accidentally seeing her again much later, he runs away.
The reader has to supply so much in all but a few of her stories. Sometimes it’s hard to tell even what a story is about from the few clues she gives the reader.
The stories are short, there are no happy stories, and the people in them have no connection with each other.
The last 20 or so pages do not tell a story; they tell, in non-fiction form, of the author’s early life in Canada.
It centers around her relationship with her mother and of an incident in which a crazy older woman comes around looking in the windows while her mother hides with her small child – the author. That woman may or may not have been of the family that owned the house before the Munros.
Book info:
Dear Life
By Alice Munro
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95
Posted by Rae Eastman
on January 31, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion.
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