The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Alice Munro is, of course, an excellent writer. She’s wonderful to read. Every sentence, paragraph and story is as well-built as a strong oak table.
These stories, however, suffer from a structural defect. They’re marked “Fiction”, so she’s allowed to invent the details. But the impetus behind the stories is biographical. And so the interest is biographical, too. And false biography isn’t interesting.
So they’re interesting because they’re true, but they’re not true. See the defect?
Despite that, they’re good stories. Little windows into a different time and place. One the author knows well, and has strong sympathy with. Literature as time travel is one of the worthwhile things to do with stories.
The best of the stories come at the beginning, in Ireland. They ride the edge between history and myth.
The title and initial image — “you think you’re looking at America, but you’re really looking at Ireland” — ought to have appeared in the rest of the stories. At least symbolically. I thought we’d be seeing glimpses of Irish culture persisting through history. There’s a little of it. Maybe you have to be a more subtle reader than I am to appreciate it.