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August 17, 2005

Alice Munro

Hard to believe it's mid-August already. Diligence continues on We Disappear... I've been furiously trying to work out some kinks in my fifth chapter, though, and when these kind of frustrations kick in, there's nothing better than reading a master writer for a little inspiration.

Sometimes, though, reading another writer can be equally frustrating. Alice Munro, for instance-- she's so brutally fantastic, so wholly head and shoulders above so many other writers in her ability to pack an entire novel's worth of material, character development, and emotion into a short story.

Michael and I have started this little habit of reading Munro aloud. When we drive from Boston to the Cape to visit his dad and stepmom, that Highway 3 time span is often the approximate length of one of her stories, beginning to beautiful end. For instance, I just read "Differently" to him as he drove; a few months back, he read "Family Furnishings" to me. If you're an Alice Munro fan, you're probably getting a little thrill right now just hearing these titles.

The difficulty in reading Munro's stories orally is that they are often so completely, devastatingly sad. They're deceptive, too, because at first glance they seem rather tame, stories concerning ordinary people living their lives-- but then they achieve incredible and surprising things (like take leaps in time that shouldn't work but do).

Here's an Alice Munro quote about her own work that I found on a Random House site:
"I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form, I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction. What do I want to do? I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way--what happens to somebody--but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing--not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens."

If you haven't read Alice Munro yet, pick up any of her books of stories and start. (There are still many stories of hers I've yet to read, which is exciting-- I want to spend a long, long time savoring them.) My personal favorite, out of all the stories I've read so far, is "Meneseteung" from Friend of My Youth, which seems to me not only a mystery about a forgotten woman in a past forgotten town, but also a meditation on what it means to be empathetic, what it means to love, and ultimately what it means to be a writer or creative artist.