By JOHN WILLIAMS
Most of us are lucky to get a gold pen when we retire. Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize.
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.”
