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.

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Dear Life by Alice Munro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Alice Munro cuts her sentences as clear as diamonds. Each story is a treasure map pointing to the deepest depths and Munro has ripped the map in half. A ripped-in-half gold cloth, diamond-studded treasure map to the human soul. It ought to be an illuminated manuscript. Dragons and vikings doing battle in ruby red and arsenic green in the margins.

There’s almost always something that exists but is unspoken. In the few stories where she ends up feeling like she has to say the thing, it tends to drag on a bit. The best stories are like dominoes. She sets up a few jewel-encrusted dominoes so you can see just how they’ll fall, then she knocks over the first one. And then the story ends.

It’s a very tricky thing to do. Unless it’s done with great care, the magic of it won’t manifest. But when it works, you hit that last period and a whole future opens up in front of you. Or a whole past, or a whole different world.

I don’t know if she would appreciate this or not, but I really do think her use of language makes her a kind of successor to Hemingway. Like Raymond Carver, I guess.



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