Redefining Happiness in Alice Munro’s Family Furnishings

“When is the best time in a man’s life?” In her autobiographical short story “Working for a Living,” Alice Munro recalls that her father, when asked that question, had answered, “Now. I think maybe now.”
It was a curious answer to give at a time when Munro’s father, bankrupted by his failed fox fur business, was working the night shift at a foundry to make ends meet. Why, of all times, now? Munro recounts her father’s answer, that happiness came when you were finally “old enough that you could see that a lot of things you might have wanted out of life you would never get.”
This idea is explored repeatedly throughout Family Furnishings, a new selection of 24 short stories from Nobel Prize winner Munro, penned between 1995 and 2014. Each showcases her unparalleled ability to elevate the ordinary, to capture the emotions running through the most mundane interactions, and to delve into what people wanted out of life and never got.
In “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” a young housekeeper doggedly pursues a shiftless man, unaware that she is the butt of a cruel joke. Despite the joke, and despite the man, she settles for a situation few others would accept. She realizes she won’t get more out of life, so she makes do and somehow, it works. Perhaps this is happiness.
Or is happiness simply perspective and reconciling yourself with disappointment? In “Amundsen,” a schoolteacher’s fiancé calls off their marriage at the last minute and callously puts her on a train out of town. Years later, she bumps into him and tells him that she’s happy, though it’s clear she still loves him. Disappointment rears its head again in “My Mother’s Dream,” in which a young mother’s musical ambitions are thwarted by a baby, while her fragile sister-in-law’s dreams of motherhood are misguided. One fateful evening, both mother and sister-in-law must set aside their desires and assume their real roles in life. In these stories and many others, Munro creates characters who realize that what they want is not meant to be, and must redefine their happiness thereafter.
Perhaps the most poignant story in Family Furnishings explores the realizations that come at the end of one’s life. In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” an elderly man ruminates on his infidelities as he loses his wife to dementia. She forgets who he is, and her affection for another man at the nursing home grows. As he struggles with love, jealousy, grief, and guilt, he realizes he may never win her love back, and may not deserve it. Instead, he endeavors to save his dying wife, even if it means uniting her with another man. Perhaps this, too, is some strange kind of happiness.
In each story, there’s a novel’s worth of revelations, regret, and empathy. Characters suffer heartbreak, secrets, and shame with dignity. They make mistakes, commit tiny domestic atrocities, and rebel against the life already charted out for them. Whatever their misdeeds and woes, Munro is a narrator who does not dramatize or dwell. Her stories move relentlessly forward, as if to say, life goes on.
Longtime fans of Munro, the diversity of this collection will delight you. Though she’s mostly known for her fiction about rural Ontario, it includes autobiographical stories from her childhood, a fictionalized account of Scottish immigrants en route to Canada, and a story about a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician. And for those who have yet to read Munro? Family Furnishings is a beautiful place to start.
Family Furnishings is out today.