Runaway by Alice Munro

Alice Munro is a genius, but maybe not a binge-read. That’s a good thing

Published: 2004

Filed under: fiction

alice munro, norm macdonald, short stories

I’ve read more than a few Alice Munro stories, usually published in magazines or online somewhere. Her stories are the safest of bets – almost always satisfying and memorable. When she died, someone in a Slack chat linked this 2013 critical piece in the London Review of Books. The writer starts with this (emphasis mine):

There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings. So she writes only short stories, but the stories are richer than most novels. Over a career now in its sixth decade, she’s rehearsed the same themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation.

He’s not wrong. Here’s another part that I agree with:

Munro’s stories suffer when they’re collected because the right way to read them is in a magazine, where they can be tucked between, say, a report on the war in Syria and a reconsideration of Stefan Zweig to provide a rural interlude between current atrocities and past masterpieces, or profiles of celebrities or sophisticated entrepreneurs. A slice of sad life in the sticks, filtered through an enlightened eye and most likely set ‘in the old days’, as the first line of one of the stories in her new collection, Dear Life, puts it.

If you take those two quotes together, it works as both a rationale for Munro’s reputation and a reason why a collection like this didn’t work for me. Her stories are like novels, her writing is so succinct and rich that you’re left feeling like you’ve known these characters forever, not for just the last 20 minutes.

The start of this book — the first 2 or 3 stories, I think — were lovely, melancholy, and engaging. As it went on, I found this draining and difficult. Themes, settings, and character traits were repeated, timelines shifted in much the same patterns, and the atmosphere of each story was somewhat similar. No specific story disappointed, though some landed better than others.

But I’d feel the same if I read several Kurt Vonnegut books in a row, or John Irving or (god no) Franzen. If Munro wrote novels, just at an ultracondensed scale, then the fatigue is well-earned, not a criticism of her skill.

Anyway. What I’m getting at is that Munro’s story collections might be better left on the side table and read one-story-at-a-time between other things, rather than as a single serving. She was a brilliant writer, and is still a must-read when I come across her work in the wild.

The other thing that came up in the Slack chat is this bit of gold — fellow small-town Canadian Norm Macdonald roasting Bret Easton Ellis when he insulted Munro in 2013. The second last one is a classic: