Sarah Wrote That | alice munro

Happy Canada Day! Miraculously, Munro’s story “Gravel” in the June 27 New Yorker is not subscriber only.

Who’s your favorite Canadian writer? Canadian novel/story?

1 Jul 2011 15:04

kelsfjord:

BRB!!!

I loved this story—not quite as twisty as last fall’s “Corrie,” but with extremely satisfying vertical leaps in time and sudden swerves in focus and point of view (yes! That is allowed!). I haven’t compared word counts with her stories from the early 2000s or before, but to me her recent work feels much faster—and much, much faster than most of last year’s ‘20 Under 40’ stories.

BRB!!!

I loved this story—not quite as twisty as last fall’s “Corrie,” but with extremely satisfying vertical leaps in time and sudden swerves in focus and point of view (yes! That is allowed!). I haven’t compared word counts with her stories from the early 2000s or before, but to me her recent work feels much faster—and much, much faster than most of last year’s ‘20 Under 40’ stories.

Reblogged from kels fjord

The Lions Gate Bridge figures in three of my favorite Alice Munro stories:

“Miles City, Montana” in Selected Stories and The New Yorker (subscriber only)
“Post and Beam” in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and The New Yorker (subscriber only)
“Jakarta” in The Love of a Good Woman, online only in torrents (?!) and excerpted in the Times’ visit to some of Munro’s Vancouver locations:

Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs. They have chosen this not only for shelter from the occasional sharp wind—they’ve got Kath’s baby with them—but because they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monicas.

The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece. They are all under the leadership of the real Monica, who walked down to the beach and introduced herself when she first spotted Kath and Sonje and the baby.[…]

These women aren’t so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they’ve reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate the bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus trees, the cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath feels their threat particularly, since she’s a mother now herself. When she nurses her baby she often reads a book, sometimes smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a sludge of animal functions.

Reblogged from Maury Postal

Since I moved to Amherst, my New Yorkers haven’t been arriving until Thursday. So tonight I was scanning though the table of contents, feeling a bit let down by the Twenty Under Forty; there’s that Ryan Lizza piece on why ~~we’re screwed~~ the Democrats couldn’t get climate legislation through, and OMG NEW ALICE MUNRO (subscription only).

So, so good. I’d been a little disappointed with her last few in TNY—the serial killer in the kitchen—but “Corrie” is fantastic, sentence by sentence and as a whole, leaner than Munro’s 1990s-early 2000s chronologies, and so refreshing after ______ and _______, no dutiful scene furniture or academic sentences eddying away momentum. The authorial hand is so in sync with the consciousness Munro generates for her characters that her doling out of information—the way she manipulates us—feels natural and appropriate, and gives dignity to Corrie’s story. One of my favorite stories of the year.

photo: Mimi Haddon

7 Oct 2010 22:21

Fever To Tell

In which James Wood attacks convention and defends the conventional, and Alice Munro offers a way out

Beginning creative writing students are always told to show don’t tell (because we all remember show and tell!). If they veer into things like “he was tall” or “the wine was good,” or, shudder to think, “she was sad,” they’re told, show me this in a scene, or, use a gesture to convey this—“he bends to go through the doorway”; “the wine leaves a licorice taste on her tongue”; “she closed her notebook and held it there a minute, closed.” Better, but after a while don’t we know what to expect? Somewhere, aren’t some neurons going to sleep?

Read on →

Fictional Divides

This week I’ve been reading Ander Monson’s Other Electricities and Alice Munro’s Selected Stories and thinking about which fiction gets classified as “traditional” or “experimental.” No two writers are the same, so any “tradition” oversimplifies the very things it’s characterizing. But there do seem to be writers who can be characterized as more interested in characters, plot and crafting scenes that a reader of Scott Fitzgerald or Flannery O’Connor would feel at home with, and writers more interested in pointing out—or playing with the idea—that such writing is artifice.

The one risks the reaction Zadie Smith has to Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland: haven’t we seen something like this before? The other risks us saying, “so what?” How many times do we need it said that narrative is artifice?

Roxanne Gay writes today on HTMLGiant in praise of the traditional story

told simply and without artifice, one where I turn the page and can’t wait to see what happens next, where the characters are interesting and well-developed and where I am invested emotionally.

Christopher Higgs replies:

For Adorno, and this is where I’d agree with him, conventional realism is bankrupt because:

1) It atrophies the imagination
2) Instead of challenging us to think critically, it works to reinforce our prejudices
3) It does not offer alternatives to the status quo, because it reinforces the structural paradigm of the status quo

Great pieces with lots of smart comments.

Other Electricities, Monson’s 2005 collection of linked stories, pleases me on that “can’t wait” level, but part of why I’ve wanted to keep reading has been the toe-curling goodness of how uniquely he gets me emotionally invested. I tend to be wary of experimental work—I feel assumptions are being made about me, the reader, and my expectations—but Monson quickly won me over. His formal experiments enable connections to characters, events and place that are direct because they don’t come in expected scenes or places in the (non-linear) time-line. There are events, terrible, poignant events, but the story circles around its characters’ lives in a continual revelation. In the best way, I feel lost in the book.

Alice Munro (more on her soon) might seem an odd comparison with Monson, and I don’t know if I would have thought of it if I hadn’t been reading them together. But both eschew scene-based storytelling—Munro puts narration first, and scenes result from it—and both play with time with a daring that seems rare in either traditional or experimental fiction. They have such a good sense of what details to give and when, I’ll sign on for where and whenever they want to take me. They’ve demonstrated: they’re the storytellers.

31 Mar 2010 21:09

“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.

16 Mar 2010 23:47

"
Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward. I feel that this is something that people may find they have to adjust to, but it’s a way of saying whatever it is that I want to say, and it sort of has to be done this way. Time is something that interests me a whole lot—past and present, and how the past appears as people change…

…I never remember being innocent. I always remember things being very complicated. Mostly I remember having a self as a child who was completely hidden from the world of adults and teachers and people around me.
"

- Alice Munro, in a 2001 interview in The Atlantic, on the publication of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

12 Jan 2010 00:23

Michiko and Me and the Bourgeoisie

Lots of fiction goodness over at the Times.

Their choices for the ten best books of 2009 include Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It (reviewed by Curtis Sittenfeld). One of the stories from the collection, “Travis, B.,” is available online courtesy of Penguin:

Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.

When he was fourteen, he started riding spoiled and un-broke horses, to prove to her that he was invincible. They bucked and kicked and piled up on him, again and again. He developed a theory that horses didn’t kick or shy because they were wild; they kicked and shied because for millions of years they’d had the instinct to move fast or be lion meat.

“You mean because they’re wild,” his father had said when Chet advanced this theory.

Michiko Kakutani is only half-impressed with Alice Munro’s latest collection, Too Much Happiness:

Read on →

4 Dec 2009 15:16