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In this week's Relief Recommends, Relief fiction editor Alan Ackmann praises author Alice Munro and her many gifts to the genre of short fiction. I’m going to pick up on some trendy Olympic terminology and propose that every editor, I suspect, has a kind of literary dream team—a set of writers whose work they not only admire, but delight in, and with whom we would consider it a privilege to work. For most editors, working with some (okay, most) of these writers is nothing but a pipe dream—that is, unless Thomas Pynchon comes out of seclusion, or James Joyce, John Steinbeck, or F. Scott Fitzgerald come out of, you know, death. But others writers are more contemporary, and working with them is still tantalizingly plausible. One of my personal favorites, and a woman whom I consider one of the best writers working today, is Alice Munro.
A Canadian Born writer whose work regularly appears in Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The O. Henry Awards, and countless other prestigious venues, Munro is best known for some of her most recent collections—most notably her two most recent books: Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. To my knowledge, she has not written a well-known novel; like Chekhov, her gifts are those of a sprinter not a marathon runner. In Munro’s case, however, a short story (whether a brief or lengthy one) often has the depth and complexity of a novel, rendering their length considerations somewhat moot.
There is much that is impressive about Munro’s stories. First and foremost is Munro’s handling of time. Oftentimes, a character in a Munro story can simply wander through a town, and what they encounter triggers memories and experiences, allowing Munro to reveal an entire history or culture through the character’s associations, and to do it so slyly that the writer does not realize what has happened until after the story is finished. This frequently makes Munro’s stories structurally complex, requiring both attentiveness and patience. It also means that Munro’s stories are more prone to dipping into their character’s inner lives, explaining their motivations and thoughts (in contrast to more distant, fly-on-the-wall type writers). Even though lengthy inner monologues and exposition are often risky for a story—they are easily glossed over, and lack the immediacy of scene—these devices are well-suited to Munro’s gifts, and she makes using them look effortless.
In contrast to their structural sophistication, the premises for her stories are often quite simple—a young girl takes a train to Toronto, a college student meets the man she’ll marry, a traveling salesman makes an impromptu visit to a former flame—but their emotional landscapes are textured, surprising, individual, and frequently heartbreaking. Each story, each conflict, arises fully from the characters’ desires and limitations, the complexity of their emotions often far outstripping that of their premises.
Because of this aesthetic, Munro’s characters are sometimes startlingly recognizable. Often, by the end of an Alice Munro collection, I get the sense of having encountered people who are both completely familiar and at the same time completely mysterious. That’s characterization at its finest.
Of the Alice Munro collections I’ve read, my favorite is The Beggar Maid, and this is also the collection I would tell a Munro novice to read first. Like any favorite book, my reasons for liking it are at least partially personal: I first encountered The Beggar Maid in graduate school, when I was also first realizing what reading was all about—what it could be. The book features ten stories about two different women—Flo and Rose—and their friendship over decades. Although the characters interweave, it is not entirely accurate to call these “linked stories”—each stands alone, and together they are neither as contrived nor as densely self-referential as many contemporary “linked” collections. Of the Munro stories in that book, the title story is my favorite. When I first read it, I had recently finished Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, and Munro’s lushness and clarity, when contrasted against Carver’s very different gifts of sparseness and distance, was especially dazzling.
In the next few weeks and months, I’ll occasionally post profiles of writers on Wednesdays—both because they are good (the writers, I mean, not the Wednesdays) and because these profiles might give you an idea of what kind of fiction we’re looking for here at the journal. So once you’ve finished reading the latest edition of Relief, give Alice Munro a look.
As a final note, even though Alice Munro would probably play point guard on my personal dream team (point guard is a basketball position, right?) that doesn’t diminish the writers we’ve already asked to join our little pick-up game. After all, discovering a new fantastic writer is one of the only things better than working with a familiar one. And I feel like, in the past two years, we’ve certainly done our fair share of discovering. Previous Articles:
Alan Ackmann, Relief's Fiction Editor, received his MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and teaches at DePaul University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Clackamas Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Ontario Review, and elsewhere. He is a former fiction editor of The Evansville Review and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2007 Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Find out more at www.alanackmann.com.
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