Alice Munro proves her mastery of the story
When Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, at the age of 82, she became the first Canadian woman to do so, and the 13th woman to win since its launch in 1901. Munro viewed the Nobel as a victory for her preferred genre.
"I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written," she said at the time.
Her mastery is evident throughout Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, which offers 24 stories written over the past two decades. (It's a perfect companion to an earlier volume, Selected Stories, 1968-1994.) Almost all of these stories have appeared in The New Yorker over the years.
As Jane Smiley notes in her generous foreword, Munro's stories never provide transcendence, nor anything particularly flashy. The focus is on the interior life; "plot" is a secondary concern. With great subtlety, Munro delves into, among other things, small- town life (notably, the rural Ontario of her childhood), the vicissitudes of love and marriage, the difficult relations between parents and children, and the painful task of reconciling with the past. There are no false notes to be found in her fiction.
As Smiley writes, Munro "has made of the short story something new, using precision of language and complexity of emotion to cut out the relaxed parts of the novel and focus on the essence of transformation."
It seems impossible to select a favorite in this collection. Turn to just about any page and you'll discover a brilliant insight into human behavior, or a startling metaphor, as in "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" (from the 2001 book of the same title): "Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument."
Munro is a sharp observer of the fraught yet inextricable bonds of family: "It was a clan that didn't always enjoy one another's company but who made sure they got plenty of it," she writes in "Wood."
The book's highlights include "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (adapted into Away from Her, a 2006 film by the Canadian actress Sarah Polley). Grant, a retired academic, reflects on his infidelities after his wife, Fiona, begins to suffer from dementia and moves into a nursing home. When she no longer recognizes her husband and falls for a fellow dementia patient named Aubrey, Grant's response is unexpected and deeply moving.
In "Hired Girl," a contemplative 17-year-old spends a lonely summer working as a maid for a stern, mirthless woman named Mrs. Montjoy: "She was always on the lookout for inattention or incompetence, which she detested." And in "The Children Stay," the title phrase refers to a man's angry demand after his wife decides to end their marriage.
Family Furnishings reminds us that Munro is our greatest contemporary short story writer. With apparent ease, again and again, she proves that she can do more in a single story — stylistically, emotionally — than most writers can do in an entire novel.
Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995 – 2014
By Alice Munro
Knopf, 620 pp.
4 stars out of four