“What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life - what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?”
- Alice Munro
I’m reading her Selected Stories. Also Robert Thacker’s 1998 essay:
[critics seize] Munro’s work most often at these very “clear patches”; that is, at those points of story at which her art is most evident, and most pointed. There is real consensus that it is never transparent, always elusive, with points of view and meanings compounding, patterns emerging out of other patterns.
Thacker’s comments on her approach to narrative are even cited on Wikipedia:
We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude—not of mimesis, so-called and… ‘realism’—but rather the feeling of being itself… of just being a human being.
But it’s my sense that she is still commonly described as a Chekhovian “realist.” The more of her I read, the less “realism” seems to apply.
The Times’ 1983 Editor’s Recommendations of her Moons Of Jupiter has a similar thought in more book club friendly language:
Mrs. Munro’s literary performance has little to do with situation and everything to do with character. Shrewd, amused, self-aware, her women are risk- takers, plucky, independent, sexually vibrant. Their intelligence beckons to the reader, who likes them not only for the dangers they pass through but for their alertness to the pleasure of the passage.
The article also recommends a collection named Cathedral:
There are artists who reach the strange by staying with the ordinary. Raymond Carver, an American writer now in his mid-40’s, has been writing stories for some years that create this effect…. Cathedral, Mr. Carver’s third collection, after Will You Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, shows a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance.
“A finer touch of nuance”; or getting rid of his editor.
