By JOHN WILLIAMS
Most of us are lucky to get a gold pen when we retire. Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize.
“Friend of My Youth” (Books of The Times)
“Open Secrets” (Books of The Times)
“Selected Stories” (Book Review)
“The Love of a Good Woman” (Book Review)
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (Books of The Times)
“Runaway” (Books of The Times)
“The View From Castle Rock” (Books of The Times)
“The View From Castle Rock” and “Carried Away” (Book Review)
“Too Much Happiness” (Books of The Times)
“Too Much Happiness” (Book Review)
“Dear Life” (Books of The Times)
“Dear Life” (Book Review)
Features from The Times:
“Alice Munro’s Vancouver” (2006)
“Northern Exposures” (2004)
“Forsaking Her Lair Only in Stories” (1998)
“Canada’s Alice Munro Finds Excitement in Short-Story Form” (1986)
Other sources:
The Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review
Archive of short stories in The New Yorker
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation archives
Ian Willms for The New York Times
Alice Munro
The Canadian short-story writer announced this year that she was done
writing fiction. “What I feel now is that I don’t have the energy
anymore,” she told The Times’s Charles McGrath in July.
Ms. Munro’s notices in The Times started on an inauspicious note. A brief 1973 review
by Martin Levin was positive, comparing the stories to “fresh winds
from the North,” but the review got the book’s title wrong: It was
“Dance of the Happy Shades,” not “Dance of the Happy Hours.”
Writing about the collection “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You”
in 1974, Frederick Busch said the stories seemed “formulaic,” their
tone “sycophantic.” In 1983, forming a much different opinion of “Moons of Jupiter,”
Benjamin De Mott wrote, “The freshness of Ms. Munro’s literary
performance has little to do with situation, everything to do with
character.” He called those characters “shrewd, amused, self-aware,”
“risk takers at heart, plucky, independent, sexually vibrant.”
From there it was mostly raves. By 1986, Michiko Kakutani was writing
that Ms. Munro “richly deserves recognition as one of the foremost
contemporary practitioners of the short story.” Reviewing “Selected
Stories” in 1996, John Updike wrote:
“As well as a spirited, acutely perceptive tale teller, Ms. Munro is an
implacable destiny spinner, whose authorial voice breaks into her
fiction like that of a God who can no longer bear to keep quiet.”
Speaking to Sam Tanenhaus on The Book Review’s podcast in 2009,
Ms. Munro said: “This does puzzle me a bit, though, there’s a lot of
comment about how I write about ordinary people, and the word drabness
comes in, too. These are the people I know. . . . None of them seem
ordinary to me, because they all want something very much, and they’re
capable of quite unexpected things sometimes.”
In his review of “Runaway”
in The Times Book Review, Jonathan Franzen famously listed the reasons
why Ms. Munro’s “excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.” (“3. She
doesn’t give her books grand titles like ‘Canadian Pastoral,’ ‘Canadian
Psycho,’ ‘Purple Canada,’ ‘In Canada’ or ‘The Plot Against Canada.’ ”)
The fourth reason on that list was her lack of a Nobel, so it needs
updating.
“There is a nice feeling about being just like everyone else now,”
Ms. Munro told Mr. McGrath about her choice to retire. But even the
humble Ms. Munro presumably doesn’t feel just like everyone else this
morning.
More reviews of Ms. Munro’s work in The Times: “Friend of My Youth” (Books of The Times)
“Open Secrets” (Books of The Times)
“Selected Stories” (Book Review)
“The Love of a Good Woman” (Book Review)
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (Books of The Times)
“Runaway” (Books of The Times)
“The View From Castle Rock” (Books of The Times)
“The View From Castle Rock” and “Carried Away” (Book Review)
“Too Much Happiness” (Books of The Times)
“Too Much Happiness” (Book Review)
“Dear Life” (Books of The Times)
“Dear Life” (Book Review)
Features from The Times:
“Alice Munro’s Vancouver” (2006)
“Northern Exposures” (2004)
“Forsaking Her Lair Only in Stories” (1998)
“Canada’s Alice Munro Finds Excitement in Short-Story Form” (1986)
Other sources:
The Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review
Archive of short stories in The New Yorker
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation archives
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