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F I C T I O N I N
R E V I E W
J A N E M E N D E L S O H N
It is a privilege and a pleasure to write about Alice Munro. When I
began this piece, before Munro had won the Nobel Prize, I was
thrilled to have a chance to discuss her work and the book she has
claimed will be its culmination, the extraordinary short-story col-
lection Dear Life. Now that her literary importance has been so
clearly recognized and rewarded, this essay feels less as if it should
be a review, or even an appreciation, and more as though it de-
serves to be a celebration. Let the champagne ow, especially for
those of us who have been reading, admiring, marveling at, and
deeply moved by Munros stories these past few decades.
To begin with: the genius of Munro, and the reason legions of
her fans were overjoyed when she won the Nobel, is that she has
not, as so many writers, artists, and other people have, been
striving for greatness. About ten or so years ago someone men-
tioned to me how impressed he was that a couple of mutual friends
were really going for it, really striving for greatness. We were
standing in the playground in Washington Square Park, and I was
D e a r L i f e : S t o r i e s , by Alice Munro (Vintage, 336 pp., $15.95 paper)
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pushing my daughter on a swing. I nodded my head but vividly
remember thinking, Striving for greatness is a prescription for
mediocrity. (Or tragedy, I could have added.) I thought it because
I had spent my life reading books by brilliant writers who had
been delivering that message for centuries, but I believed it be-
cause I had been enjoying and learning from the stories of Alice
Munro since I was a teenager.
Striving for greatness suggests a narcissism that is entirely
absent from Munros work. She writes about narcissistic charac-
ters, the provincial mother with a grandiose self-image being the
most frequent (and the most likely to use a phrase like striving
for greatness), and she explores and exposes all kinds of self-
absorption, small-mindedness, intentional and unintentional cru-
elties, and human failings in practically every one of her stories.
She even describes in interviews, and reveals in the autobiographi-
cal air that emanates sometimes from the stories themselves,
choices made in the struggles between marriage and self, mother-
hood and writing that could be described that even she de-
scribes as selsh. However, her sensibility, her unsparing and
broad perspective, is not narcissistic. And selshness of the kind
she writes about is often the result of social, historical, and eco-
nomic constraints that she also details with unerring precision.
The vision of her work is outward-looking, generous, profoundly
interested in existence. She has been pursuing this interest her
whole career with steadfast focus. (In my mind she appears as a
brave, beloved, and slightly, charmingly comic gure: an indefati-
gable sailor crossing an ocean alone, hand on the tiller, hair in the
wind.) It is not that she hasnt been writing great stories, or even
trying to write great stories she has its that she has been
concentrating on the task at hand, not on an image of herself or
other peoples ideas about her or her work. At least that is the
feeling, the open secret one of her collections is titled Open
Secrets she consistently conveys.
So Alice Munro has become, for many writers and readers, a
kind of hero, a female hero, or a heroine, whichever term you
prefer, and this is tting because female heroism, as it manifests
itself in ordinary lives, is her great subject. Yes, she can certainly
be considered one of those regional writers whose work extends to
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all humanity; she writes often about small towns in Ontario,
where she grew up and later lived. But her stories also take place
in major cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. Yes she can be
called a master of the short story; this is also true. But her gifts for
structure, compression, language, observation, and playing with
time make it possible for her to communicate a wisdom and vision
without which all her knowledge of a region, all her artistry in
describing it, would not be enough to make her the kind of writer
she is, a writer whose close counterpart in my mind is not only
Chekhov, to whom she is often compared, but George Eliot, with
whose specicity and depth as well as perspective and subject
matter she shares so much. Without Munros sensibility and sub-
ject matter, her radiant lack of narcissism and deep empathy and
curiosity about the female hero living a so-called ordinary life, she
would have been a remarkable shaper of stories, an outstanding
literary practitioner, but not nearly so great a writer, not Alice
Munro.
Although my image of Munro casts her on a sailboat crossing the
ocean, the quintessential Munro heroine is often to be found on a
train or a bus, usually crossing some part of Canada, always in the
midst of the journey of her life. Sometimes she is at the station.
Sometimes she intends to be on a train or a bus or at the station
but isnt, and instead steps o or outside the route of life. In the
often cited, luxuriant yet tightly plotted Carried Away from
1991, Louisa, the central character, comes to a new town, falls in
love, lives her complex life lled with unexpected disappoint-
ments and happiness, and ends up, after a visit to a doctor about
her heart trouble, moving on, but unsure of where to go or what to
do. She nds herself, as the result of a name she read in a news-
paper coincidentally the same name as that of her long-dead
rst love sitting in a park watching a local labor union ceremony
at which the man with the same name, Jack Agnew, is supposed
to speak. Louisa is overcome by agitation before the ceremony
begins. When a stranger asks her if she is all right she answers, I
have to catch a bus. She then decides: She would just go and sit
in the bus depot until it was time for her to go home.
But she remembers that the bus depot is being rebuilt, and the
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train station had been removed during World War II. She knows
she didnt arrive by train or bus, but doesnt seem to know how she
came to the town or how she is getting home (presumably she is
being picked up by her son or stepdaughter, but she doesnt men-
tion this). Louisa stops to get a Coke at a coee shop. While there,
she bumps into her lost love, the long-dead Jack Agnew, and they
have a conversation, or so she thinks. As it turns out she has gone
under a wave:
You could say anything you liked about what had happened
but what it amounted to was going under a wave. She had
gone under and through it and was left with a cold sheen on
her skin, a beating in her ears, a cavity in her chest, and
revolt in her stomach. It was anarchy she was up against a
devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and
radiant vanishing consolations.
This is a beautiful passage, both as a description of a heart-
induced anxiety attack and also as a description of Louisas entire
life sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing
consolations and of almost any Alice Munro story. When a
Munro heroine is not traveling on the train or bus of her life, she is
apt to fall into these waters, or to notice them, these waves, this
anarchy she was up against.
What helps Louisa steady herself is a group of Mennonites.
They enter the coee shop and Louisa thinks, These Mennonite
settlings are a blessing. The plop of behinds on chairs, the crack-
ling of the candy bag, the meditative sucking and soft conversa-
tions. It is as though she is welcomed back to the world of the
senses, the everyday. Or is she? A Mennonite girl oers her a
butterscotch mint, and Louisa sucks on it as they do on theirs,
and allows that taste to promise her some reasonable continu-
ance. This scene is written so that one can see in it a hint of
Louisas death. Maybe she even has died as we were reading:
What place is this? She said to the woman beside her. The
paragraph ends there, and so does what we know of Louisa from
that point in her life.
Most interpreters of Munro claim her as a staunch realist, but
scenes such as these show that her work transcends such deni-
tions. Even if this scene is meant to be strictly realistic, what it
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reveals are the immense depths of mystery and multiple angles of
perception that exist in everyday reality.
Mennonites also gure in one of Munros new stories, a compan-
ion piece of sorts to Carried Away and a powerful story in its
own right called, as if summing up the essential image of
Munros work, Train. Train is unlike many of her stories in
that it is told primarily from a mans point of view. In this case, the
man is Jackson, a soldier on his way home from the war who,
instead of completing the journey and returning to his ance,
jumps o the train and wanders o into a dierent life, another
story. Jackson from Train could be Jack Agnew from Carried
Away if, instead of returning to his ance (named Grace in
Carried Away, Ileane in Train) and thereby breaking Louisas
heart and later dying in a factory accident, he had never come
back at all.
In Train, after Jackson jumps o the train he drifts into the
world of Belle, whom he meets as she is half coaxing, half-
scolding a little Jersey into the stable. It doesnt take much scold-
ing or coaxing to get Jackson to settle into Belles life, for the
moment before he follows her into her house he hears the sound of
Mennonites riding by: For a while now hed been hearing a
peculiar sound. The road rose up a hill, and from over that hill
came a clip-clop, clip-clop. Along with the clip-clop some little
tinkle or whistling.
The Mennonites are all dressed in black, with proper black
hats on their heads. They seem to be for Munro a recurring image
of death: The sound was coming from them. It was singing.
Discreet high-pitched little voices, as sweet as could be. They
never looked at him as they went by. That chilled him. The buggy
in the barn and the horse in the eld were nothing in com-
parison. Jackson chooses domesticity over the Mennonites. He is
willing to jump o the train to avoid the life waiting for him at
home, but he cannot face the people who seemed quite cheerful
in Carried Away and whose singing is as sweet as could be in
Train. Their cheery self-absorption, both calming and terrify-
ing, is a complex death symbol, unthreatening but cold, sweet but
black, steadily driving down the road at all times but something to
be avoided, not succumbed to, until the end.
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Jackson makes a life with Belle in her ramshackle house, and
they become a kind of brother and sister pairing who function as
an old married couple. Belle is sixteen years older than Jackson.
They are even at one point mistaken for brother and sister Men-
nonites (they are neither) by a secondhand car dealer: That shook
Jackson up but at least it was better than husband and wife.
Jackson would rather be a husband than a Mennonite. He and
Belle live together for years. Eventually, Belle gets cancer and
Jackson accompanies her to the hospital in Toronto for an opera-
tion. Perhaps now he will have to face death or Mennonites, but as
it turns out he doesnt. Belle survives, and when Jackson comes to
see her she asks him to get her a Coke (reminiscent of Louisa in
the coee shop), but its against orders for him to get her one. Belle
tells Jackson she wants to escape.
If you wont Ill do it myself. Ill get to the train station
myself.
There isnt any passenger train that goes up our way
anymore.
She abruptly gives up on her plans for escape no Coke, no train
and tells him she is going to leave him her house in her will.
But Belle still does not die. The second time Jackson visits her
she is doped up, but has been reborn. She looked a lot younger
than the woman he had brought to the hospital. She cant concen-
trate on what he says because she seemed to be in a state of
amazement. Controlled amazement. In this state, Belle opens up
to him as she never has before and tells him the most signicant
story from her childhood, about her father seeing her naked when
she was a teenager. Her mother had been a semi-invalid, and her
father had come upon Belle by accident, but he hadnt looked
away: My face looking into the mirror and him looking at me in
the mirror and also what was behind me and I couldnt see. It
wasnt in any sense a normal look. When her father later apolo-
gized to her she could not forgive him right away. He left the
house, and not long after, I heard the train coming and all at once
the commotion and the screeching which was the train brakes.
Her father had been run over by the train.
While Belle is recounting her story and her thoughts about it,
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the reader understands this: although Train has been told pri-
marily from Jacksons point of view it is Belle who is the hero of
this story. In telling and reinterpreting the central story of her
childhood she is able to forgive her father and herself. Now I have
got a real understanding of it and it was nobodys fault. It was the
fault of human sex in a tragic situation. In facing death Belle has
looked at life directly; she has gone on a journey and come out the
other side. She says, I feel so released. Its not that I dont feel the
tragedy, but I have got outside the tragedy, is what I mean. It is just
the mistakes of humanity. You mustnt think because Im smiling
that I dont have compassion. I have serious compassion. But I am
relieved. I have to say I somehow feel happy. Jackson listens, but
he is glad when it is time to leave. Just the mistakes of humanity
is not a phrase he is ready to understand.
The story does not end there. As in many Munro stories, it con-
tinues past the point at which other stories would long be over.
Jackson never returns to Belle, but the story follows him as he
drifts into another life in Toronto. In Munros universe the pos-
sibility is raised that maybe Jackson cant understand Belles story
or stay with her because he is a man, or because he has been a
soldier and seen war, or both. He has seen death, maybe too much
of it, but not, like Belle, faced death and come out the other side.
He is still drifting, and cannot forgive himself for his past mistakes.
We drift with Jackson into his next job working as a janitor of a
building. One day a woman comes looking for her daughter, who
has run away, and Jackson realizes from the sound of the womans
voice that it is Ileane, the girl he left waiting at the train station.
The scene in which Jackson, unseen, overhears Ileane talk to her
landlord about her missing daughter reads like a mirror image of
the scene in Carried Away in which Louisa talks to Jack Agnew
in the coee shop. In Train, Jackson puts together Ileanes life
story from what he overhears, but he never reveals himself. The
owner gestures for Jackson to come out of hiding but Jackson
shook his head violently. He remains to Ileane as much a phan-
tom as Jack Agnew is to Louisa. Ileane has a 7-Up, which the
owner gets for her: He might have thought that more ladylike
than a Coke. Again, the Coke. Louisa had a Coke. Belle in the
hospital asks for a Coke. These Munro heroines want to taste the
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sweet but less ladylike real thing, as it used to be called in the
advertisements.
The story ows on, much like Carried Away, to give us more
information from before the beginning of the action, going farther
back in time to when Jackson rst met Ileane. We learn that he
had a nasty stepmother, who seems to have acted on her sexual
impulses toward him, unlike Belles father. We learn that this is
why Jackson could not consummate his relationship with Ileane,
either physically before he went to war or later, when he chose not
to come home. When he was as young as six or seven he had
locked up his step-mothers fooling, what she called her fooling or
her teasing. So Jackson had a secret just like Belles but worse.
And more: He had run out into the street after dark and she got
him in but she saw thered be some real running away if she didnt
stop so she stopped. In other words, Jackson tried to leave, like
Belles father, but he couldnt get away. And unlike Belle he cannot
forgive the mistakes of humanity, perhaps because in his case the
mistake was not really a mistake, was closer to an intentional
cruelty. He could possibly forgive himself, understand why he
never returned to Ileane, but he seems too damaged for this reve-
lation. Instead, Jackson spends his life running away.
The symmetry of this story, the mirroring of Belles and Jack-
sons lives, their reected stories, their opposite ways of handling
conict, and their movement in dierent directions, like trains
pulling away from each other, is beautifully maintained. And be-
yond the symmetry within the story is the storys symmetrical
relationship to Carried Away. All this is captured in the central
description of the mirror that Belle describes: My face looking
into the mirror and him looking at me in the mirror and also what
was behind me and I couldnt see. Here Munro plays masterfully
with perspective. This image describes what Munro is doing in the
story, and prepares us for the epiphany that Belle has in the hospi-
tal, when she sees what she couldnt see before. The tragedy of
human sex. The mistakes of humanity. This is a mirror out of
Velzquez or Manet. This is art. This is the real thing.
And to complete the symmetry: when Jackson leaves his job as a
janitor, he said that he had been called away, without indicating
why or where to. He empties his bank account and leaves late in
the evening and gets on a train. He slept on and o during the
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night and in one of those snatches he saw the little Mennonite
boys go by in their cart. He heard their small voices singing. Like
Louisa toward the end of Carried Away, Jackson sees the Men-
nonites. But he doesnt sit with them or face them. He gets o the
train in a new town.
Train isnt merely a mirror image of Carried Away; it is tilted
at a slight angle, something like the mirror in Velzquezs The
Rokeby Venus or in Manets Bar at the Folies-Bergre. This tilting
permits us to see the world from multiple angles. It also creates a
feeling of deep space, and Train goes even farther (pun in-
tended) than Carried Away, allowing Belle to have her realiza-
tion, which is more complete than Louisas wave in Carried
Away. Belles understanding is akin to Lily Briscoes moment at
the end of Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse: She had had her
vision. But there is always more. In Train this is Jackson, his
damage. Munro leaves it to the reader to see that Belles vision is
not necessarily complete, but the story itself approaches a sublime
completeness.
Carried Away is the work of a mature artist in full control; but
the stories in Dear Life transcend even this. Aspects of these stories
can be read as mirrors of the earlier stories, and all the stories
explore the same themes Munro has examined over the years:
marriage, motherhood, sex, accidents, sickness, small-town society.
The new stories contain many of the same images and tropes:
trains, buses, dangerous water, Mennonites, life-changing letters.
But in Dear Life, Munro explores them in ways that feel eortless
and deep: passages seem to be almost about nothing and then
suddenly jolt the reader into a moment of emotional force. They
are like very good, very old diamonds, so clear that they appear
colorless and plain until they catch the light just so and refract
every color all at once.
Toward the end of the rst story in Dear Life, To Leave Japan,
the main character, Greta, takes a train across Canada in an at-
tempt to reconnect with a man she met briey at a party. She is
married, and her husband is away on work. She takes her daughter
Katy with her, has a dalliance with a fellow traveler, and while
doing so loses sight of Katy. Its a storyline that has come up in
Munro tales before: the unhappily wed or overwhelmed mother
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distracted and losing sight of her child, then feeling guilt-ridden
(most notably in Miles City, Montana, from The Progress of
Love, 1986). But the scene in which Greta searches for Katy has
acquired new power. This is Greta looking for Katy:
A new fear then. Supposing Katy had made her way to one or
other end of the car and had actually managed to get a door
open. Or followed a person who had opened it ahead of her.
Between the cars there was a short walkway where you were
actually walking over the place where the cars joined up.
There you could feel the trains motion in a sudden and
alarming way. A heavy door behind you and another in front,
and on either side of the walkway clanging metal plates.
These covered the steps that were let down when the train
was stopped.
You always hurried through these passages, where the
banging and swaying reminded you how things were put
together in a way that seemed not so inevitable after all.
Almost casual, yet in too much of a hurry, that banging and
swaying.
The door at the end was heavy even for Greta. Or she was
drained by her fear. She pushed mightily with her shoulder.
Greta nds Katy between the cars, amazed and alone, and the
terror of the search inspires Greta to be a more attentive mother.
But the fear and disorientation of the scene are not quickly forgot-
ten. As I read through Dear Life I kept remembering that early
scene, and in thinking about it, and about the predominance of
trains in the book, I was reminded of the most famous of literary
trains, the trains in Anna Karenina, beginning with the one on
which Anna rides back home to Petersburg from Moscow, dis-
tracted by thoughts of Vronsky: She kept having moments of
doubt whether the carriage was moving forwards or backwards, or
standing still; Anna felt as if she was falling through the oor.
When the train stops briey at a station, she meets Vronsky on the
platform, and he tells her that he has been following her, not
unlike the way Katy explains she was looking for her mother.
But of course there is another train in Anna Karenina, the one
that Anna throws herself under. It seemed to me as I was reading
Dear Life that one of the main projects of Munros work has been
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to discover stories for women that do not require them to throw
themselves under a train. Belles father is run over in Train, and
Jackson jumps on and o trains his whole life. But Munros hero-
ines ride the trains and take what the journey brings. They may
have disappointments, aairs, struggles with motherhood, even be
ostracized or cut o from money and society as a result, yet they
almost always nd some reasonable continuance, as Louisa does
in Carried Away. Even if that continuance is death, it is not
suicide. And even if its a bout with cancer and close to the end of
life, it involves an awakening, an acceptance, an awareness of just
the mistakes of humanity. It is as if Munro has been rewriting her
own version of Anna Karenina, one in which Anna, in spite of her
mistakes, is allowed to have Levins revelations and awakening.
What a project, what a journey, what a great story.
Many essays could, and will, be written about Dear Life. The title
alone is perfect. (It calls to mind another brilliant book title,
Philip Roths Exit Ghost. There is a fascinating essay to be written
on the relationship between Munros and Roths work, but that is
another story.) The layers of meaning in the title holding on to
something or someone for dear life, writing a letter to life of
gratitude and farewell, an everyday phrase all these capture the
essence of Munros work. But the most useful reading of the title
can be found in the nal four stories of the book, which Munro
introduces thus: The nal four works in this book are not quite
stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in
feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely in fact. She adds, I
believe they are the rst and last and the closest things I have
to say about my own life. In true Munro form she leaves us
pondering every word. By closest does she mean truest to reality or
closest to her heart? Has she been holding on to them all these
years for dear life? And to what extent is she now letting them go?
These four extraordinary pieces are The Eye, Night, Voices,
and Dear Life. They contain all the themes of Munros work.
Everything is in them. I wont spoil readers enjoyment by writing
too much about them here. I have already given enough away. But
I will say that they are compelling, moving, profound. And for
longtime readers of Munro they are fascinating, showing us more
than just glimmers of the girl and woman behind the stories,
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giving us insight and a sense of the origins of the characters and
motifs we have been traveling with all these years. They are a
generous gift from a great writer. In the not-quite-story Dear
Life, Munro tells a tale about when she was a baby and her house
was stalked, in a sense, by an old woman who had lived there as a
child. Munros mother is frightened one day when the woman
comes around the house, and she grabs Munro out of her baby
carriage, grabbed me up, as she said, for dear life. Her mother
goes from room to room holding the baby until she feels certain,
almost, that the old woman, Mrs. Nettereld, has gone away.
The piece explores and raises many questions. It suggests the
distinct possibility that Mrs. Nettereld wasnt somebody to be
frightened of at all. It implies in part that Munros mother was
slightly paranoid, or a least somewhat grandiose in her telling of
the story. It also reveals an intense bond between mother and
child, between this specic mother and child, that is carried on
throughout the book and throughout Munros work. Only here it is
presented with such depth, forgiveness, understanding, and un-
sparing clarity of vision that it takes ones breath away. It makes
you want to hold on to this book for dear life, and it makes you
understand why for so many readers Alice Munro is our hero.