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We first encounter Doree as she rides the bus to prison to visit her husband. She is a motel chambermaid: "She liked the work -- it occupied her thoughts to a certain extent and tired her our so that she could sleep at night." Why does she wish to have her thoughts occupied? What images does she wish to banish from them? Little by little, Munro reveals the chilling events that have led up to this moment: her meeting with Lloyd, an aging hippie, when she was only 16; his psychological domination of her; his growing paranoia; at last, unthinkably, his murder of their three children.
After a lifetime spent honing her natural narrative gifts, Munro is able to spin this out in mesmeric style. But the masterstroke is the way she gets across Doree's current state of mind, the thought processes that make her continue to visit Lloyd against the advice of well-trained therapists and social workers, and to believe that he is the only person, in the end, who can fully share her pain. As always, Munro demonstrates an extraordinary ability to inhabit the minds of characters who bear little surface resemblance to her, and she is also far more at ease than most contemporary writers with a wide range of social classes.
Recognizing this quality in her work, Munro has suggested that a life spent in the small towns of southern Ontario has exposed her to a wider range of human types than she might have encountered in an urban existence, where people are more stratified both socially and professionally. This seems a plausible theory and goes far toward answering the ever-interesting question of why it is that quintessentially urban writers (Joyce, Dickens, Balzac) present a more complex but not necessarily richer vision of human life than rural or "regional" authors (Faulkner, Hardy, Flaubert). Munro's protagonists come from both ends of the social spectrum, and they are of every age: in fact in a couple of these tales, "Fiction" and "Free Radicals," the author kaleidoscopes different periods of her characters' lives together in a long view one seldom sees in short fiction. And in "Some Women," a close-to-perfect piece of work, she demonstrates her facility with the child's-eye view of adult life, a technique originally made famous by Henry James's What Maisie Knew.
The now-elderly narrator of "Some Women" looks back on the late 1940s, when at the age of13 she got a summer job fetching and carrying for a cranky old lady, Mrs. Crozier. Mrs. Crozier's son is dying of leukemia in an upstairs bedroom; his wife, Sylvia, has a job teaching summer school two afternoons a week, which stigmatizes her in the eyes of the town: "People were just down on her because she had got an education," the narrator remembers. "Another thing they said was that she could have stayed home and looked after him now, as promised in the marriage ceremony, instead of going out to teach."
Need any more be said about the narrowness and meanness of this community? Old Mrs. Crozier doesn't like her intellectual daughter-in-law any more than the rest of the town does, and when a sexy, narcissistic masseuse named Roxanne begins coming to the house to work on the old lady's aches and pains, we see, through the narrator's half-comprehending gaze, a sinister alliance grow between the two women, culminating in their ungodly contest against Sylvia, the wedded wife, for an "almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier." "The carnality at death's door -- or the true love, for that matter -- were things I had to shake off like shivers down my spine."
Munro's characterization of Roxanne, deftly accomplished through a minimum of dialogue, gesture, and allusion, is immediately recognizable. "I began to understand that there were certain talkers -- certain girls -- whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people -- people like me -- who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway." In this case the crude character is observed from the outside; in another marvelous story, "Child's Play," the narrator herself diagnoses the crudity -- the evil, as it turns out -- in herself.
The title story of the collection is an experiment, at least in Munrovian terms; though it doesn't quite come off it is of interest, as of course is almost anything this writer produces. Fifty-seven pages long, "Too Much Happiness" is Munro's imagining of the life of an actual 19th-century Russian woman, Sophia Kovalevsky (1850-91), who first came to Munro's attention in the Encyclopedia Britannica. "The combination of novelist and mathematician immediately caught my interest, and I began to read everything about her I could find. One book enthralled me beyond all others," she writes: Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky, by Don H. Kennedy. Kovalevsky's life story is indeed fascinating: she succeeded in becoming a world-class mathematician at a time when there were no academic posts for women in Russia or almost anywhere else in Europe (only Swedish universities opened their doors to her), and she lived through dramatic historical events, including the 1871 Paris Commune. "Too Much Happiness" makes pleasant enough reading, but as with so many fictionalized versions of real people and events, one can't help thinking that the actual biography -- in this case Little Sparrow -- probably has more to offer.
So Alice Munro, despite the hints she dropped that her previous fiction collection (The View From Castle Rock) would be her last, is still going strong, and still growing and developing. It will be interesting to see what surprises she might have in store for the future. --Brooke Allen
Brooke Allen is the author of Twentieth-Century Attitudes; Artistic License; and Moral Minority. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, and The Nation, among others. She was named a finalist for the 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.
Alice Munro got her start in writing as a teenager in Ontario, and published her first story while attending Western Ontario University in 1950. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Dance of the Happy Shades, would not be published until 1968, but when it arrived, Munro rapidly established herself as a unique voice in contemporary literature. Over the course of fifteen short stories, Munro displayed a firmly focused vision, detailing the loves and life-altering moments of the inhabitants of rural Ontario. Munro takes a gradual, methodical approach to unraveling her stories, often developing a character's perspective through several paragraphs, only to demolish it with a single, biting sentence. Yet she also explores those heartbreaking delusions of her characters with humanity, undercutting the bitterness with genuine compassion.
Munro was instantly recognized for her debut collection of stories, winning the prestigious Governor General's Award in Canada. Monroe would then spend the majority of her career writing short stories rather than novels. "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," she explained to Random House.com. "I want the reader to feel something is astonishing -- not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me." Munro would only write one novel, Lives of Girls and Women, a coming-of-age tale about a young girl named Del Jordan, which is actually structured more like a collection of short stories than a typical novel. Throughout the rest of her work, she would continue to explore themes of love and the way memories shape one's life in short story collections such as Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, and the award-winning The Love of a Good Woman, and her most recent, Runaway.
Because her stories are so unencumbered by clichés and speak with such clarity and truthfulness, it is often assumed that Munro's work is largely autobiographical. The fact that she chooses to set so many of her tales in her hometown only fuel these assumptions further. However, Munro says that very little of her material is based on her own life, and takes a more creative approach to inventing her finely developed characters. "Suppose you have -- in memory -- a young woman stepping off a train in an outfit so elegant her family is compelled to take her down a peg (as happened to me once)," she explains, "and it somehow becomes a wife who's been recovering from a mental breakdown, met by her husband and his mother and the mother's nurse whom the husband doesn't yet know he's in love with. How did that happen? I don't know."
As Munro grows older, her themes are turning more and more toward illness and death, yet she continues to display a startling vitality and youthfulness in her writing. A writer with a long and celebrated career, Alice Munro's work is just as compelling, honest, and insightful as ever.
Munro wrote on a typewriter for a good part of her career, calling herself a "late convert to every technological offering" in a publisher's interview. "I still don't own a microwave oven," she says.
Fiction
Wenlock Edge
Deep-Holes
Free Radicals
Face
Some Women
Child’s Play
Wood
Too Much Happiness
Acknowledgments
1. Dimensions
As in her earlier story “Runaway,” Munro examines the effects of the psychological domination of one person by another. Why does Doree visit her husband in jail? Lloyd’s letters are a central part of the story: why does his notion that he has seen the children in another “dimension” (page 29) bring a kind of comfort to Doree? Does her thought that Lloyd, “of all people, might be the person she should be with now” (page 30) seem sensible, or dangerous? When she is on her way to the prison once again, Doree miraculously resuscitates a young man: how does this act connect to the title, and what does the final scene suggest about her future?
2. Fiction
From whose point of view is this story told, and how does this shape our understanding of events? Edie has “a mind that plods inexorably from one cliché or foolishness to the next . . .” (pages 40–41). How might it be possible for Jon to prefer Edie to Joyce? In part two, how does Joyce feel when she reads about herself in Christie’s story? What is revealed by the child’s perspective? What does Joyce learn about herself that she hadn’t known, or had forgotten? Is it fitting that Christie doesn’t remember Joyce?
3. Wenlock Edge
Hearing Nina’s life story, the narrator says, “Her life made me feel like a simpleton” (page 72). Does this explain the narrator’s willingness to comply with Mr. Purvis’s requests? Why do you think Munro has chosen “On Wenlock Edge” (from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad) for the narrator to read to Mr. Purvis? How are the narrator’s feelings about literature, poetry, and the university library changed by her encounters with Nina and Mr. Purvis? Why does she send Ernie’s address to Mr. Purvis, and what does she gain by doing so? What details or events are most troubling in this story, and why?
4. Deep-Holes
As the family picnic begins, Sally finds herself in a dangerous place, “nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage” (page 96). How would you describe Sally’s husband, and her marriage? Why does Kent leave home and refuse contact with his family? Why does he choose to live as he does (pages 109–17)? What effect does her meeting with Kent have upon Sally (pages 116–17)? What does the story’s title signify?
5. Free Radicals
Like “Dimensions,” this story presents an intimate view of someone who is capable of murdering his family. But it’s also a story about ordinary mortality: Nita’s husband has died of a heart attack, and she is suffering from liver cancer and may not have long to live. How does Nita cope with the idea of her own impending death? What story does the young man tell Nita when he shows her the photograph (pages 129–32), and what story does Nita tell him in return (pages 134–36)? What is the effect of this reciprocal response on Nita’s part? Compare this story’s ending with that of “Dimensions.”
6. Face
What is the web of familial and extrafamilial relations that determines the plot of this story? Discuss how the narrator and his friend Nancy create their own freedom and happiness within close range of a deeply unhappy ménage à trois. Who is the cause of the rupture that occurs on pages 155–57? Are Nancy’s attempts to mirror the flawed face of the narrator—first by painting, later by cutting—the clearest expressions of love he experiences in his lifetime? The narrator decides to settle in his childhood home because “in your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places” (page 164). Why is this insight so profound? He goes on to suggest that the past is irreversible; do you agree or disagree?
7. Some Women
Who are the women referred to in the title? The story is narrated from a young girl’s point of view. What does she understand——and what does she not understand——about what is going on in Mrs. Crozier’s house (page 188)? Who is the main actor in the story, the one who is trying hardest to manipulate others? What is the motive for this manipulation?
8. Child’s Play
The story opens with references to an event that is not yet explained. Why does Munro frame the story in this way? Explaining why she feels “persecuted” by Verna, Marlene says, “Only adults would be so stupid as to believe she had no power. A power, moreover, that was specifically directed at me” (page 204, 201). How does this idea of power ricochet through the story? Why does Marlene become an anthropologist, and why does she shun intimacy (pages 211, 2–12)? What does Charlene do to Marlene in asking her to go in search of Father Hofstrader? Compare this story with “Face,” with which it shares the idea that the action of a moment can be the determining event in a person’s life.
9. Wood
Why is Roy obsessed with cutting wood, an interest which is “private but not secret” (page 226)? How has Lea’s illness affected their marriage? What is being repressed or unexpressed by Roy in this story? What is the transformation that takes place in Lea? What is the loss referred to at the bottom of page 245, and what does Roy mean when he retrieves from his mind the phrase, “the Deserted Forest” (page 246)?
10. Too Much Happiness
Outwardly this story diverges from the rest, but what concerns or questions connect it with others? What is the relationship between Sophia’s love for Maksim, her ideas about womanhood, and her joy in mathematical thought? Are they in conflict? How does Munro present female intellectual ambition and its frustrations, even its tragedy? What do you think is meant by Sophia’s last words, “too much happiness” (page 302)?
11. General questions
MJinPA
Posted May 5, 2010
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I think Alice Munro is one of the most talented living author of short stories. For anyone who has never read a Munro story, don't be fooled by the kindly, harmless-looking old lady photo in the back cover flap. Munro provides just enough interesting surface details to lure a reader into her characters' lives - until she's got you irretrievably involved in the dark underbelly of those details. Believably bizarre and macabre events in a person's life story, drawn in the most delicate prose.
All that said, I did not love all the stories in this collection. For instance, the "title track" feels too experimental, not as clean and well-crafted as the others. "Wenlock Edge" could also be shored up a bit. Although it is intricate and involved and plays around interestingly with literotica, one suddenly feels as though Munro got bored or lazy and ended the story as quickly as she could; and although her ending is the usual elegant, understated affair, the part just beforehand feels as though it got lobbed off. Aside from those two, however, the collection lives up to Munro's usual high standard. In my opinion, the best two stories are "Fiction" and "Free Radicals" (especially the former) - and "Dimensions" is a fabulous opener. The most disturbing, "Child's Play," succeeds on a double level in that Munro produces the same effect on the reader that the child storyteller is trying to achieve on her friend. Wonderful.
If you like short stories in the (non-Southern) tradition of Flannery O'Connor, I am sure you will like most of this collection.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 6, 2010
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It was very difficult to even finish this book. Yawn. I enjoy sharing my books with other friends and family; however, this one will not be circulated as I cannot justify putting someone else through the misery of hoping the stories will get better. They don't.
1 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.This great ten story anthology looks deep into relationships with strong characterizations. Nine of the contributions are under forty pages; only the title entry is longer at sixty pages. As always Alice Munroe provides her audience with a profound collection.
In "Dimensions" Doree grieves on the bus for her three children who were murdered by their father so they would not suffer the same misery he suffered of their mother leaving them. "Fiction" stars Christie who tells the stories of her stepmother the music teacher in a published anthology. "Wenlock Edge" college student explains how her roommate fools her into going on a dinner date with her lover. Sally learns how "Deep-Holes" in marriage can become. In "Free Radicals", Nita's friends are there at first while she grieves, but she rejects them; now she is moving on and needs them but none are there for her as they were hurt by her when they needed her. His father stared at his "Face" once after he was born and never looked at his son's disfigured face again. Young Mr. Crozier is surrounded by "Some Women" while dying from leukemia; but keeps a stiff upper lip so as not to alarm the female retinue who hide their melancholy from him while caring for him. In "Child's Play" Marlene and Charlene become summer camp BFFs, but torture Verna until Marlene muses over "How can you blame a person for the way she was born?" "Wood" centers on Roy who refinishes furniture, but works alone since he and his wife Lea never had no children. He is hurt and all alone apparently dying in The Deserted Forest. "Too Much Happiness" centers on Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevski who has found men limit her choices; still she writes stories in spite of her father insisting she is selling herself and obtains a teaching position in Sweden in spite of her lover living in Paris as she reuses to allow males to limit her.
Harriet Klausner
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 27, 2012
Alice Munro is my all time favorite author. In my opinion there is nothing else you could possibly want from a writer. That said, if you like plot-driven stories, this is probably not the book for you. These stories are very character-driven. If you've read other of Munro's books, I think you'll find that this one has a little bit of a darker edge.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 15, 2010
I struggled to get through this. Some of the stories were okay, but most were unenjoyable. I would not recommend this.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 21, 2010
A perfect book for pleasure.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Boustrophedon
Posted February 7, 2010
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The stories in Alice Munro's latest work, Too Much Happiness, are almost too vivid. Her characters, original and offbeat, find themselves doing and saying incredible things, but the stories are so well written, the prose is so flawless, the detail so exactly right, that the reader never questions the likelihood of such events. The masterful plots, leading often to horror by the most pedestrian of events, stick with you, haunting you and unsettling you. In one story, "Wendlock Edge" (the title is taken from a Housman poem), for example, the young woman narrator is asked to dinner at the home of a old rich man, a man we know for his ability to control the narrator's roommate, Nina, a girl who once "got herself pregnant," blames herself for he unhappy encounters with men, in other words. The manipulator's assistant instructs the narrator to strip before entering the dining room and she sits naked through dinner. Then the old pervert and the young woman adjuourn to the library where he asks her to read from A Shropshire Lad, instructing her, almost casually, not to cross her legs. It is not a seduction scene but a sexual assault, and as we read we realize the young woman will be haunted for a long time for her complicity in her own violation. When Nina runs away from her "sugar daddy/abuser," the narrator, perhaps to hit back at Nina, who had suggested she take her place at the dinner, informs the old manipulator where Nina is, and they disappear together.
In another story, a successful woman looks back on her past in such a way that we are confused. She has never married, never maintained relationships; she seems to suffer from some form of world-weariness or ennui; then she learns that a woman she hasn't seen in years has died and requested of her a favor. When the woman tries to carry out the friend's dying request, we come to understand the secret she and the friend had kept since childhood, the secret that had destroyed their lives--their murder of a special education student while they were at camp; her past has haunted her, we come to realize, as surely as the past of young woman of Wenlock Edge will haunt her in the future.
Munro has so much insight, so great an understanding of the human heart, that the stories, as artful as they are, come to feel almost like the stories close friends tell each other when they have nothing to hide and all the time in the world. These masterpieces of fiction in the hands of almost any other writer would have become novels, and we would have lost the intensity that Munro generates by restricting the size of her canvas.
Fallen_angel_smokes
Posted January 4, 2010
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This is too much "bordem!"
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Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Maybe it's just me but these stories didn't move me. I couldn't wait to finish the book; almost didn't. Everything was just too simple and light.
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Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Ms. Munro is a master of the short story, an under appreciated art form for most of the book buying public. Monro's fiction is more true to reality than most non fiction, if that makes sense? Her female characters live and breath and are typically facing the hard realities of life, but no matter how hard life smacks them around these ladies take the hands they are dealt and go on living with a poise and confidence. There is a snappiness to her writing that somehow makes descriptions of the most dreadful circumstances more readable. A dark danger sometimes pervades, survival of the ego on display and that satisfying twist at the end. All this is woven together with an elegance and poignancy that creates one beautiful, beguiling story after another!
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Overview
An international literary event: Ten new stories from a beloved and award-winning author.This stunning collection of new stories demonstrates once again why Alice Munro is celebrated as a pre-eminent master of the short story. While some of the stories are traditional, set in “Alice Munro Country” in Ontario or in B.C., dealing with ordinary women’s lives, others have a new, sharper edge. They involve child murders, strange sex, and a terrifying home invasion. By way of astonishing variety, the title story, set in Victorian Europe, follows the last ...