SHORT STORIES: Too Much HappinessBy Alice Munro Chatto, 305pp, £17.99
IN 1988, shortly before his death at the age of 50, Raymond Carver published Elephant, his final collection of short stories. The closing story, Errand, was unlike anything he had previously written. It recreated the last days of the Russian master Anton Chekhov and his death in a Black Forest spa.
Nothing Carver had previously achieved soars quite like this breathtaking story of stories. A similar feat is accomplished here in the title story of this, at times, eerie and disturbing collection by Canadian Alice Munro. This is her twelfth volume of short stories and it has become almost redundant to review her work, so consummate is Munro’s craft, so astute her candid, intelligent reading of lives lived in a world always changing yet somehow leaving the old hurts and losses intact, along with their power to shock and wound.
She has taken the short form, unpicked it and re-stitched it so well, making it bend and shimmer to her biding, that the reader is drawn in like a moth to the flame. Praising Munro has become a mantra; writers defer to her, readers adore her. It could be argued that the recent winner of the International Man Booker Prize who has rendered the ordinary and the power shifts in relationships into art lacks the range of the only writer who has consistently been set shoulder to shoulder with her, the great William Trevor.
Among his many gifts is his flair for a chill subtle menace. Throughout these stories the element a relentlessly ironic Munro most often draws upon is chance cruelty.
In what is her darkest book she explores horror and extreme behaviour; a righteous bully murders his three children to prove a point to his wife. Elsewhere a woman who successfully replaced her now dead husband’s previous partner is forced to provide a snack in her kitchen to her possible killer, who may or may not have murdered three members of his own family; her only consolation is that she is dying of cancer.
As a war hero lies waiting in bed for death from leukaemia, the narrator, then a young teenage girl, recalls how the man’s crazy old stepmother and her slap-happy hired masseuse, the vulgarly knowing Roxanne, who thrived on being overly familiar, attempted to undermine his relationship with his wife, a doting older woman.
In a collection that is rife with irony Some Womenis an odd, skin-crawling tale which begins: "I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukaemia. Some people who got polio got better, crippled or not, but people with leukaemia went to bed, and after some weeks' or months' decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died."
The narrator wonders exactly what the old stepmother was up to “To keep herself entertained in a curious way?” The dynamics in the house become very strange indeed, culminating in the dying man asking the narrator to lock his door and keep the key hidden until his wife’s return. It closes on a note often struck throughout the book: “I grew up, and old.”
Another story, Winlock Edge, with its quasi-erotic and frankly queasy account of a narrator having accepted a supper invitation in the place of her supposedly indisposed roommate only to strip naked to eat with an elderly stranger, falters into a substandard David Lynch screenplay. It is the weakest story in the collection as well as, probably, of Munro's career.
Overall, throughout much of this volume it is as if she is engaged in reassessment – instead of dealing with the connections that so often form the core of a Munro story, she is exploring specific events. The power of memory is indeed a funny thing. Child's Playis that and more. She gives a hint at the sheer weight of the event driving the story in its opening sentence with its tone of rueful regret: "I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards."
It is obvious that something appalling happened. “Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don’t vanish so much as become irrelevant” memory forces its way into the consciousness, “wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it though it’s plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.”
Fictionpacks a great deal into its thirty pages, confirming exactly what Munro has always done best, proving that the short story invariably says more than most novels. Because it is a Munro story it is obvious that Joyce's cosy world in a romantic country house on the outskirts of town with Jon the furniture-maker didn't last. They had been clever kids who dropped out and ran away together. Joyce is a cellist not too keen about teaching music at school level. When Jon hired short, sturdy, recovering alcoholic Edie "a young woman who did not look old enough or damaged enough to have much of a career of dissipation behind her" yet who is covered with tattoos "too intricate or maybe too horrid to be comprehended" no one would have expected Jon to fall in love with her.
But he did. “The heavy-witted” flannel shirt-wearing carpenter’s apprentice “eclipsed Joyce with her long legs and slim waist and long silky braid of dark hair.” Joyce sets out alone into the world. Years pass in a decisive fast forward as they do in Munro’s work and Joyce is now the third wife of a kindly man who, when he throws a party, invites his hopelessly brain-damaged first wife and the second wife, the lesbian whose partner has just had a child. Joyce, who is now secure in her place in the world, has become “a lean eager-looking woman with a mop of pewter-coloured hair and a slight stoop which may come from coddling her large instrument or simply from the habit of being an obliging listener and a ready talker.”
Into this convivial scene enters a young woman with “wispy pale hair, evasive pale face, invisible eyebrows.” Munro is so sharp, Joyce recoils, deciding she is “the sort of girl . . . whose mission in life is to make people feel uncomfortable.”
The woman, Maggie, turns out to be a writer. Munro has some fun with the title of Maggie’s book, causing the assumption that it is a self-help book. How Are We to Live is “a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”
Well, the facts of Maggie’s life set off a twinge of recognition in Joyce which expands on reading one of the stories. It is a terrific tale, as terrifying as life, as only Munro can record it.
The narrator of Faceis a now older man who has shared his life with a birthmark. He had a successful career as a radio presenter. Yet even in age he has never forgotten his devoted mother telling him the words his father uttered when he first saw him as a newborn: "I know what he said," the narrator announces, "You don't need to think that you're going to bring that into the house."
But the defining horror is the memory of the day the little girl he used to play with, painted her face red. Instead of the gesture being a taunt, he recalls that the child had “sounded very excited . . . her voice was bursting with satisfaction, as if this was what she had been aiming at her whole life.” The writing is so powerful; Munro summons an older man who can now see his mother’s pain as she turns on the insolent mother of the girl and pours out a torrent of reasoned anger.
Munro is almost beyond reviewing, she has consistently produced startling fiction. Her two finest collections remain Friend of My Youth (1990) and The Progress of Love(1986) with its brilliant title story, still one of her finest. "I got a call at work, and it was my father. This was not long after I was divorced and started in the real-estate office. Both of my boys were in school. It was a hot enough day in September. My father was so polite, even in the family. He took time to ask me how I was. Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they first ask how you are." The father had phoned to tell the narrator he had just found her mother dead in the kitchen. Yet Open Secrets(1994) has its own claims and comes to mind when reading the closing story of this new collection.
As with several of the pieces in Open Secrets, the title story, Too Much Happiness, is a historical narrative. Munro has shown how well she deals with historical detail and fact, the title story here is based on the life of Sophia Kovalevsky, the 19th century Russian maths genius. I am biased – I have a horse named after this daughter of a nobleman who achieved academic greatness. Kovalevsky's life reads like a Russian novel. Munro has crafted a gorgeously moving tale with shades of Turgenev and Chekhov. It opens with a man and woman walking. "You know that one of us will die" the woman informs the half-listening man: "one of us will die this year . . . . Because we have gone walking in a graveyard on the first day of the New Year."
It is a story of revelations. Sophia goes to visit her dead sister’s son. Having endured the hostility of her brother-in-law, she then speaks to the boy and gives him money. “He took it with an unpleasant grin, as if to say You thought I’d be too proud, didn’t you? Then he thanked her, hurriedly as if this was against his will.” For this one story, this book should be purchased and treasured. But then the surest way to approach Alice Munro is to read all her stories, think a while, and then return to them again and again.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
