Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro

At the International Festival of Authors in 2009, Alice Munro told audiences about her early love affair with the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, and in particular "The Little Mermaid." Reading that story’s sad ending, she posited, might have been what actually began her writing career. “I was appalled,” she told the audience. “I got up and I went out and walked round and round outside the house, making up a happy ending to 'The Little Mermaid.' She got the prince! And she didn’t have to be turned into foam on the sea.”

For those who’ve read Alice Munro’s stunning and subtle stories over the years, her yearning for a neat, happy finale might be surprising. The 81-year-old, highly acclaimed author primarily sets her deceptively quiet stories in her native Canada—landscapes dark, cold and evocative as any Andersen offered his readers—and certainly isn’t known for tying the narratives up in neat, pretty bows. Instead, Munro’s fiction edges along the same lines our own real lives walk: that thin edge between desperately wanting to make legible stories out of the randomness of our world, and the impossibility of knowing our future enough to do so.

In much of Munro’s work, that tension of the events in the characters’ lives—between what she tells us about them outright and what she implies—is crucial, and none more so than in Dear Life: Stories. Each of the tales in this book hinges around characters who aren’t exactly sure that they’re happy with their choices, aren’t 100% committed to what they say they want, and are trying to make sense (or avoiding making sense) of where their decisions are taking them.  It’s also telling that at the same IFOA conference mentioned above, Munro said outright that her next work—this book—would be about sexual ambivalence. So many of the characters in these stories are especially invested in how their romantic and sexual desires affect them and others, and how they can make the stories they’ve told themselves about life match up with their actions.

One story in particular, “Train,” draws together many of Munro’s favorite themes and approaches. The story follows Jackson, who we meet on a train just after he’s returned from serving in WWII. Jackson is supposed to meet someone or someones (we don’t learn the details until much later), but he jumps off the train, wanders to a farm, and starts an entirely new life with a woman 16 years his senior. This doesn’t bode well for our characters, err, character, and we’re rewarded for our suspicion…after many years, he leaves Belle after she reveals difficult information about her past, and he drifts again to begin yet another life, where in bits and pieces we learn more about his past.

The story adeptly covers large swaths of time, dipping in and out at only crucial moments. Broken chronology is one of Munro’s oft-used techniques, and she’s wonderful at it. Munro has said (and I paraphrase) that she likes fiction that moves along like life: the incidents that make up and feed into any one person’s story aren’t necessarily recognized or told in linear order. “Train” takes advantage of this truth to the fullest, giving us only the information we need to move the story forward and leaving us curious about the rest.

“Train” is an understated masterpiece in true Munro style, incredible on a sentence level for its leanness, its bare-boned strength (Jackson describes Belle in one scene, he notes “the raw-looking cords that stretched between her collar bone and chin.”) It offers us stark portraits of landscapes, as well as insights into how the American conception of the urban and pastoral are under-developed (“people… seemed to think if you weren’t from a city you were from the country. And that was not true.”) But most interesting of all is that “Train” functions on two entirely separate, viable levels. There is a subtext in the story that, if you catch it, changes everything. And, if you, doesn't significantly reduce your enjoyment of the story. No small feat.

“She was a certain kind of woman, he was a certain kind of man.”

This is how Munro describes Jackson and Belle. Unlike so many modern authors, Munro does something few contemporary publishers today would celebrate or allow: she actually trusts her readers’ ability to figure things out for themselves. Munro seems to have no qualms about cleverly concealing the key to an entire narrative in a few seemingly uninformative sentences, and while that can be frustrating for some readers, the joy of discovery in her work is unparalleled.

It seems wrong to spoil the story by revealing “the certain kind of man” that Jackson is. Needless to say, nothing is revealed outright; it is all assumption, interpretation and guesswork. I didn’t catch it the first time; I’ll even admit that. In truth, on my first read, Jackson just made me angry. To me, he was half misogynist and half sufferer of the Peter Pan Syndrome that so many young men fall prey to. I felt sorry for him, thought maybe the impetus of the story was post-war PTSD or something similar, but I didn’t like him.

My anger took me eagerly along with the protagonist. Instead of ruining the story, it made me curious as to where this selfish man would end up. I enjoyed my outrage, and I even enjoyed Munro’s unwillingness, as a writer, to solicit my anger; the writing is completely neutral and nonjudgmental.

On second read, though, things felt a little different. Maybe a lot different. The discoveries I made, the hunch I had, saw me poring over details I’d brushed over before. Exactly, I know, what a great writer wants from a reader.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why this story, and all of the stories in Dear Life: Stories, are worth reading. They immerse us in a warm bath of moral ambiguity and hesitant decision-making that feels utterly, sometimes crushingly, familiar. They are eerie, often, because although we always know what’s going on, we’re not always sure about what’s really going on. Which is much like life, isn’t it? And any writer who can do that as well and for as long as Alice Munro has deserves our attention, our utmost respect, and certainly an indulgent, careful read (or two or three.)