Life In A Sentence. - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories - book review

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
Alice Munro
Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 320 pp.

In the halcyon days before he became Oprah Winfrey's sparring partner, National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen made a fascinating admission. "After DeLillo, the living author I most admire is [Alice] Munro," Franzen told the New York Times Magazine.

How can one reconcile Don DeLillo's sweeping intercontinental tomes with Munro's exquisite portraits of confused Canadians? Times writer Emily Eakin speculated that though Franzen "tackles heady themes," he is also "betting that there is demand for stories with the emotional satisfactions of Alice Munro."

Talk about a backhanded compliment. As if sex, men, women, religion, politics--all the stuff of Munro's fiction--is not "heady" material. Why should Munro bother looking beyond small-town Canada when she has conjured such diverse species of the human animal from its lush, rugged landscape?

Take the endlessly plundered topic of gender, on which no author is quite as illuminating. "Nettles," from this latest collection, begins with a woman meeting a man from her past. Suddenly they are eight again, wading down a river, out of the country and into "town." (Munro always breathes new life into this seemingly old-fashioned conflict.) They stumble on a game of war, in which girls must be nurses and boys combatants. Against such gender typing, Munro's characters do not fight, or rage, or cynically crack wise. Instead her boys and girls display formidable candor and abandon. To the young narrator, "It was such a joy to be part of a large and desperate enterprise, and to be singled out within it, to be essentially pledged to one fighter. When Mike was wounded he never opened his eyes, he lay limp and still while I pressed the slimy large leaves to his forehead and throat and--pulling out his shirt--to his pale, tender stomach." By comparison, Munro's adults are innocents.

When the "Nettles" boy and girl awkwardly meet again, after marriage, children (one gruesomely dead), and the writings of Simone de Beauvoir have left them still yearning, we know to expect neither romance nor anger, but sadly, simply, "love that was not usable, that knew its place." Munro's obsession with men and women, and how they circle each other, is certainly, if subtly, political. That so many Munro characters (especially the women) have intellectual leanings also gives her stories strong social resonance.

"Family Furnishings," for example, tracks a bold "career girl" named Alfrida, and a younger, aspiring writer, from the end of World War I to the 1960s. We get no cliches here about conformity and liberation. Though a politically engaged "city person" and a columnist at a local paper, Alfrida is actually quite reactionary. "There was a problem for her with Senator McCarthy--[Alfrida] would have liked to be on his side, but his being a Catholic was a stumbling block. She called the pope the poop," Munro slyly writes.

"Family Furnishings" is also a typically deceptive stylistic performance from Munro. Her deft manipulation of past and present tense, of narrative voice, as well as her exploration of the writer's role in society, put her postmodern credentials on display. But inevitably, the drama of love, mortality, and human entanglement trump such formal matters.

Disease and death have a particularly prominent role in this collection, Munro's tenth. In "Comfort," a school science teacher (and ardent atheist) is the target of Protestant fundamentalists. Yet that's background noise to the disease which is ravaging this dogmatic educator, and to his wife's relationship with an undertaker. This awkward dalliance captures one widow's ambivalence toward not only her departed husband, but also the rituals of death.

Munro's pursuit of such, well, grave matters does not come at the expense of more mundane, elemental observations. She is fascinated, for example, by the smell of men--"their work clothes and tools and tobacco and mucky boots and sour-cheese socks." Her men, whether detached or abusive, invariably shy away from intimacy, especially at its most basic level. One male character, a professor, "had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus," while another "hates being reminded" of his wife's monthly period. From the passionately sexual to the coldly biological, Munro ingeniously offers fresh, disturbing perspectives on how men and women see (and smell and touch) each other.

The title story is practically a novella, a portrait of Johanna, one of Munro's most vulnerable characters. Dressing in a shop for a fateful trip, she rues the store mirrors, positioned "so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies right away." Thanks to two unwittingly cruel children, Johanna believes her trip to see a feckless, ill young man will result in marriage. She could not be more wrong. Or could she? This doomed pairing becomes a keen meditation on marriage itself, as Munro captures some of the base needs which lead to lifelong bonds: fear, helplessness, financial ruin. Call it cynical or convenient, but Munro does not suggest that the satisfaction of such needs is necessarily a bad thing.