When Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro died a month ago today, plaudits began to rain down from all corners. Somewhat to my own embarrassment, I’m afraid, since I had never read anything by Munro, which put me behind even my German wife, who encountered Munro years ago in a course she took on Canadian literature at the University of Bonn, of all places. More or less every tribute praised her as one of the all-time great masters of the short story. (Munro, that is, not my wife, talented though she—my wife, not Munro—is. I mean, Munro was talented too… oh, forget it.) That’s pretty high praise, and I figured I should do something to close the gap in my education.
So I picked up a collection of Munro’s short stories, chosen more or less at random, partly on the basis of back cover descriptions (which, to be honest, did not differ dramatically from one another) and, I believe, the difference of two or three dollars in price. One doesn’t want to splurge on an unknown (to me) quantity. The result: over the last week and a half, at the rate of about a story per day, I have made my way through Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. And reading Alice Munro for the first time.
Not a lot happens in these stories, I was about to write. Only that’s not exactly right. A second stab: nothing very dramatic happens in them. But that’s not quite right, either. In “How I Met My Husband,” a young woman develops a crush on an itinerant, already married pilot, waits dutifully every day after his departure to receive the letters he has promised to send, then finally realizes no letter is coming and instead marries the mailman who had routinely failed to deliver the never-written letters. In “Tell Me Yes or No,” another woman sets out to track down a former lover, hoping to learn that he really did love her after all, only to learn accidentally from his wife not only that he is dead, but also that he’d had a similar affair with another (at least one other) woman. In “Memorial,” a woman visits her sister—their relationship is a tense one—for the funeral of her nephew, who has died young in an accident. In the night after the funeral, she is sexually assaulted by her brother-in-law, though “assault” is perhaps too definitive a term, for both are drunk, and it is ambiguous whether the sex is fully consensual or not. Before departing, she has a brief moment of quasi-reconciliation with her unsuspecting sister.
Love, marriage, affairs, death, disappointed longings, family rivalries: one could not say that nothing happens in these stories. And for the people involved, the events are certainly dramatic enough. Indeed, these themes are the stuff of tragedy. But Munro, one might say, does not make a fuss over any of it. Instead, events that in a different telling might have resulted from a family curse, or the wrath of the gods, or the inexorable workings of fate, appear here as altogether ordinary and everyday. As, I suppose, they are.
The many remembrances of Munro since her death have identified important features of her work: her gift for careful observation; her precise language; her ability to intimate psychological states by what she leaves unsaid; her refusal to judge her characters. There is little point in my expounding upon what so many others have already said better than I could. But perhaps I can offer three small observations that have struck me in reading these stories and that do not simply echo what I have repeatedly read elsewhere.
First, Munro’s stories evince a profoundly democratic sensibility. These are the tragedies—or sometimes merely the foibles—of very ordinary people, the kinds of people we all know and who live next door. (Or perhaps are related to us. Or perhaps—this, I think, is often the kicker—are us. [Yes, I know: are we.]) Part of Munro’s gift is to reveal that the life of potentially anyone is worth telling and may conceal depths of desire, love, loss, and pain that we never expected and only notice if we are prepared to pay close attention to those around us. Indeed, Munro’s careful avoidance of judgement, by negating any incipient moral hierarchies, amplifies this egalitarian undercurrent. Everyone in her stories appears human, all too human.
Second, Munro’s special talent—at least as it seems to me on the basis of this one collection—is her subtle portrayal of the ways in which we all deceive ourselves (and in the process others, but especially ourselves), being not quite honest about truths that make us uncomfortable or that we would rather not admit about ourselves. In “The Spanish Lady,” for example, the narrator complains bitterly about her husband and best friend, who have been having an affair behind her back. As the story nears its conclusion, however, we learn that she herself has been guilty of repeated previous infidelities. In “Executioners,” the narrator relates an incident from her youth when a nearby house burned down, killing its two inhabitants. But it becomes clear to the reader (though never stated explicitly) that the fire had been set deliberately, and that the narrator knows the likely culprits. She has never said anything about this, of course—perhaps due to her youth and confusion, but also, it seems, because one of the murdered men had routinely harassed her in a sexually threatening manner. She was hardly sorry to see him dead. Should she herself be numbered among the title’s “executioners”?
Something similar occurs in the volume’s title story, “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You”—a very subtle story and, I think, the strongest in the collection. We have another female narrator, Et, whose relationship to her beautiful sister Char grows more ambivalent as the story progresses. The story is too layered and complex for brief description, moving back and forth between past and present (as Munro does in many of these stories). A man with whom Char had formerly been in love but who then had married someone else returns to town. They resume their friendship, apparently innocently—Char’s husband Arthur is also friends with the old flame—but perhaps also romantically. At a crucial moment, Et lets drop a comment that seems deliberately intended to remind Char of her past jilting, and to imply that it is about to happen again, though she has no reason to suspect that this is actually true. That night, Char poisons herself. In the story’s last two pages, we learn that Et moves in to keep house for Arthur after his retirement. They play rummy together and tend the garden. “If they had been married,” we read in the closing line, “people would have said they were very happy.”
Did Et deliberately nudge her sister toward suicide? Out of jealousy? Secret fondness for Arthur? She comes close to confessing this, without quite doing so. Did the “Spanish Lady” really blame her husband, or had she driven him to the affair through her own cheating? Does the narrator in “Executioners” really have any doubt about who had started the fatal fire? When I wrote earlier that Munro shows the many ways we deceive ourselves, it might have been better to say that she shows how we almost deceive ourselves, without quite succeeding. At certain moments of honesty the truth slips out, surfacing in our consciousness, though we may not admit it openly, may never speak or even think the words. At some level we are all guiltily aware of many uncomfortable truths about ourselves; it would be difficult to live with the shame of frankly admitting all of them.
This brings me to my third and final point. I noted earlier that Munro avoids judgement on her characters. Her manner of telling their stories, however, compels the reader to withhold judgement as well. Because as soon as we realize that these people are guilty of things they cannot fully admit about themselves—sometimes actions, but often simply emotions, antipathies, desires—it starts to dawn on us that we are no different. Who among us could not recall numerous moments of which we are ashamed, ones we admit to no one else and try, as much as possible, to avoid thinking of ourselves? Once we are honest about this, standing in judgement upon Munro’s characters begins to feel rather awkward, to say the least.
Perhaps we could say that Alice Munro’s stories, despite their reticence, remind her readers of a rather old and familiar piece of moral advice: let him who is without sin throw the first stone.
Thanks for reading. See you next week for another installment From My Bookshelf.
Note to readers: If you would like to learn more about Alice Munro (and from people who know her work much better than I),
is marking the one-month anniversary of Munro’s death over at by curating a list of Substack posts about Munro that appear today. Head to her site for links to more Munro memorials.