Go Ask Alice

Alice Munro, the Canadian author who passed away in a retirement home last week at 92, richly deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to her in 2013. Munro turned out story after story about domestic drama and frayed relationships in the towns and cities of the Great White North. She captured the paradoxes of life in a polite, low-crime society where many people somehow have never mastered the basic niceties of getting to know their neighbors and showing respect to those with different beliefs and values.

Munro was one of the most prolific short fiction writers of the last century, turning out thirteen original collections and assorted compilations later in her long career. Interviewers such as Mervyn Rothstein of the New York Times probed Munro’s seeming unwillingness to get around to writing a novel. Implicit in some of their questions was a view of short story authors as servers of a kind of literary tapas, light and tasty and diverting, who cannot compete with novelists in commitment and breadth of vision.

But each work of this fine stylist is an argument for quality over quantity. In a few dozen pages, Munro could communicate truths about life in her country and force readers to reflect on the question of what Canada is, other than a far-flung mélange of culturally and linguistically disparate peoples who pay taxes to Ottawa.

Close Strangers

One of Munro’s pieces, with the ironic and deceptive title “Fits,” appears in Alberto Manguel’s 1991 collection Canadian Mystery Stories. Munro goes to some lengths to depict the sedateness of life in a postcard-perfect, snowy Ontario town where people are so polite that they make a point of bothering their neighbors as little as possible unless they have reason to suspect that something may be amiss in the house next door. A farmer who sells fresh eggs drops off a batch at the home of Peg and Robert Kuiper and asks to leave those that their older neighbors, the Weebles, ordered with the Kuipers because the Weebles appear not to be home. Robert says yes, Peg can drop them off in the morning before heading over to the store where she works.

When Peg ambles over to the Weebles’ place, she finds that something seems amiss and, venturing into the house, makes a gruesome discovery. Someone has murdered the elderly couple in their bed. At least that’s the account that Peg and the constable share with others. Suspicion turns to Peg. Did she kill the couple or just find the bodies? Munro makes the story highly ambiguous. It is possible that Peg felt such revulsion at seeing an older version of her and her husband, years down the line in this faceless suburb where nothing happens and life has no purpose or goal, that she suffered a psychotic break.

Then again, the Weebles and the Kuipers barely knew each other at all, despite living next door from one another for years. The arrangement is not unlike that between English and French Canada. There is something sociopathic, not to say evil, about the indifference and slow-burning hostility that have gone on with such monotony year after year, decade after decade, Munro suggests. In this highly polite society, people are so indifferent to the fate of their neighbors that the question of a possible moral transgression is almost an afterthought. The Kuipers and the Weebles could not have cared less about each other. You have to wonder what point anyone could really hope to make by arguing that, no, Peg Kuiper too decent and upstanding a citizen to have committed a monstrosity.

The More the Merrier

Alienation is a theme that Munro plays to perfection. In “Visitors,” one of the stories in her collection The Moons of Jupiter, she depicts a family gathering in an Ontario town with a muted emotional palette. One of the hosts, Wilfred, has not seen his brother Albert in thirty years. Albert, a Saskatchewan native, lies sick in bed through most of the reunion, as Wilfred, his wife Mildred, and other guests drive around the bleak and desolate town.

Wilfred’s fumbling attempts to relate to his brother tend to draw upon symbols of a national esprit de corps that exists only on the most abstract level and does not galvanize people or inspire any lasting passion. He boasts about a gallon bottle of 140-proof whiskey that he won at a dart tournament he and his friends had to navigate heavy snow and snarling traffic to attend. Wilfred would never actually drink the whiskey. “I keep it for the honor of it,” he tells Alfred. An empty symbol of a chimeric national identity.

The difficultly of making and sustaining bonds with others is on display in “Hard-Luck Stories” and “Prue,” where it is often hard to know whether characters’ current relationships or ones that they have survived gnaw at them more. “Hard-Luck Stories” presents a kind of Raymond Carver scenario, in which the recounting of love and loss from the past presents an ironic commentary on characters’ present dilemmas.

The narrator, hanging out with a female friend and a male acquaintance in Toronto, tells the story of a trip she once took with her then-partner to the home of friends on the Quebec side of the provincial border. The appearance at that gathering of a youthful playwright named Martin, “whose plays were too European to be successful here,” presents the guests with the all-too-familiar forking of life into the paths of doomed literary genius and suburban anomie and boredom. Unfortunately for poor Martin, cultural philistines have the upper hand. In this story-within-a-story, Martin comes to learn the truth of one of Ezra Pound’s most memorable lines: “Caliban casts out Ariel.”

“Prue” is a tale of the literal return of the repressed, in which Gordon, a man having a fling with the titular character, faces repeated interruptions when the wife he divorced shows up at his door and throws the dirty laundry of his past in his face—literally. They may think they have moved on, but she is not done with him, nor he with her. The relationships between people in this proper, rigid, hidebound, unhappy society may make you think of a line from the American poet Theodore Roethke’s “Her Becoming,” where he refers to “mutilated souls in cold morgues of obligation.”

Alice Munro’s oeuvre is more than a high-culture analogue to long-running efforts in the comic book series Alpha Flight to fathom the dilemmas of Canada’s identity. Her elegant prose, clever plots, and compelling narratives constitute perhaps the ultimate triumph over the insularity of the society they depict.