The Mythic Meets the Modern

There is something elusive about Alice Munro. She does not have a caricaturable face; her style is too subtle and natural for imitation; and her people, women descended from Scottish Presbyterians, may remind many of her readers of themselves. Her regular setting, Southwest Ontario, though important, is not what you want to remember.Part of the problem in fixing Ms. Munro’s image is her multiplicity. She has authored roughly 100 short stories, and a sympathetic reader will understand that they are all worth reading. Few writers are so consistent. Of course some stories are better than others, but they are peaks among peaks.And if these stories could be collated to show a Munro archetype, a trademark theme, it would have to be something abstract, like this: A single object may be viewed from two perspectives so disparate that the single object becomes twain.Ms. Munro grounds her autobiographical collection on this theme. The title, “The View from Castle Rock” (Knopf, 349 pages, $25.95), refers to a high lookout in Scotland, from which one of Ms. Munro’s ancestors believed America was visible. In old age, this man, James Laidlaw, immigrated to Canada, but his descendents became crabbed.”To think what their ancestors did,” Ms. Munro’s own father reflects: “The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean. What was it squashed their spirits? So soon.” The venturesome immigrant felt his spirits rise when he viewed America from afar, but his descendents, spooked by the wilderness around them, turned inward.At the beginning of this book, Ms. Munro herself travels to Scotland. She tells the story of two legendary men, one a man out of tall tales, leaping canyons and chasing fairies; the other a self-scorching minister who struggled with Antinomianism, the radical protestant belief that the elect are excused by grace from observing moral law. What fascinates Ms. Munro is that these two men were contemporaries. Though they seemed to belong to different eras, one belonged to the other’s congregation. “Past and present lumped together here made a reality that was commonplace and yet disturbing beyond anything I had imagined.”Commonplace and disturbing: dissonant adjective pairs like that come up everywhere in “Carried Away” (Everyman’s Library, 559 pages, $25), a new selection of Ms. Munro’s stories. An aged father, when he talks about himself, is “apologetic but self-respecting.” A mother trumps up her homeland by talking about it “in a dogmatic, mystified way.”These seeming paradoxes always turn out to make sense. A bold young woman’s expression “was calm and reckless.” While doing repetitive manual labor, another young woman observes that “the mind sunk (though sometimes the spirit can stay marvelously light).” These flourishes do vital work, bringing complexity to life in a snappy, self-contained sentence. One person really can feel two things simultaneously in Ms. Munro’s fiction.A knack for seeing two sides of the same issue animates good fiction. There is disjunctive love. There is selfdoubting self-awareness, as in the title story, “Carried Away”:That was nearly five years ago and it still seemed to Arthur like the end of a carefree time in his life. But to other people he had always seemed very responsible and serious — no one noticed much difference in him.” There is simple irony: “‘The soul?’ I said, speaking lightly, feeling an appalling rush of love and recognition.There is misunderstanding between partners. In “Miles City, Montana,” a husband thinks of his childhood, during the Depression with a single working mother, as a time of poverty, but his rural wife sees it another way. She is not militant, but cannot help herself: “To my mind, Andrew’s urban life had been sheltered and fussy.”If Ms. Munro seems to be the supreme writer of basic fiction, it is because the basic trick of fiction is to live in disagreements, as Ms. Munro does from the verbal level to the more important level, at which a story climaxes. At the end of “The Beggar Maid,” a woman catches her ex-husband’s eye in an airport, and he gives her a look of pure hate. Who could be capable of such a look?“Oh, Patrick could. Patrick could.”“Patrick could” because she has hurt him that much, and “Patrick could” because he is so mean that he deserved that hurt in the first place. Both are true.The best story, “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” finds Ms. Munro writing about herself at a height of ambivalence: the age of 13. She does not ride a bike to school because that would seem too asexual. She rides it only to explore nature with a capital “N,” to lie beneath a cherry tree, “and to see how it rose, as if out of my own skull, rose up and lost itself in an upside-down sea of blossom.” Lying there, she gets dirt on her back, and now she has to worry about seeming too sexual. This story and several others revolve around a misapprehension, doubled.As a book, “The View from Castle Rock,” mirrors the rest of Ms. Munro’s work.”The Wilds of Morris Township” excerpts a family document that already appeared, slightly tweaked, in “A Wilderness Station,” from Ms. Munro’s collection “Open Secrets.” The difference in the manuscripts is almost humorous: In the real document one brother “twits” the other where the fictional one stores up his annoyance and kills his brother. “A Wilderness Station” begins in 1852, with dark strife reminiscent of Cain and Abel, and ends in 1907, with a tour de force of dramatic irony in which a young woman narrates a final meeting of nemeses but doesn’t get it, and goes on in her letter about a jaunty steam-powered car. The mythic meets the modern. The new, memoirish story is relatively slight; it exists perhaps to delineate the fiction of the older story, to set up a textual relation worthy of Ms. Munro’s art of multiplicity. The new collection does not triumph alone, but beside the other work it creates a new depth for Ms. Munro’s oeuvre. Its peculiarity as a memoir points directly to the heart of the stories, back to the question of how to interpret a life.blytal@nysun.com

The Mythic Meets the Modern

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