'She had no pegs to hang anything on'

| Friday January 21, 2011 00:00

Too Much Happiness took the Man Booker International Prize in 2009. This volume is doubly rewarding; it is a collection of short stories by one of the world's greatest writers, Alice Munro. It is an unexpected pleasure for short stories to be recognised and rewarded. It is said that she writes with 'Tolstoyan resonance'. She is perennially nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature.

Munro is a Canadian who delves into the lives of people in Huron County in southeast Canada, mainly in Ontario, in and around Toronto. Her stories are usually about women, their friendships and the men who revolve around them. This is her 17th book and most of them are collections of short stories. Many of her stories are published first in magazines like The New Yorker, Paris Review and Atlantic Monthly. In reading Too Much Happiness I found I was actually re-reading most of the stories and it was a pleasure to do so.

Murno, who will be 80 in July, has in the past sounded the depths of young girls coming of age and the ways unique situations impact on them, leaving indelible marks that permeate across the years, shaping their lives.

More recently Munro has been writing about people across a number of generations, giving her the opportunity to explore aspects of aging, altered relationships and loneliness. Munro has had cancer and a heart bypass operation. In Canada she is claimed as 'Our Chekov'.

'Too Much Happiness' displays her mastery of subtle endings. Hers are not O'Henry type stories with surprise endings; double whammies. Instead Munro tends to seek new insights into the meaning of her character's lives, to give a re-assessment of their experiences. She explores in depth their thoughts, and the inner feelings, their secret lives across the years, the ramifications and consequences of their personalities and biases.

In 'Deep-Holes' Kent, when he was nine-years old, fell into a sink when the family had gone on a hike to a bluff.

Kent seemed to always irritate his geologist father, Alex, no matter what he did. He mangled one leg and broke another. His recovery was slow, causing him to miss months of school. At home Kent and his mother, Sally, secretly played a geography game about remote places in the world. Kent dropped out of university in his first year and vanished. They did not hear from him for three years. Then he wrote his parents from a transient stop in California:

'It seems ridiculous to me that a person should be expected to lock themselves in a suit of clothes. Like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grow over it, over the clothes I mean, and that person cannot ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is the pain as well as the joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself may seem overblown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness -' (page 102).

'Wenlock Edge' is told by a young woman who rented a large garret, a third floor attic, when a university student in London, Ontario. Her mother's bachelor cousin, Ernie Botts takes her out to dinner once a fortnight. A scholarship student, she works in the college cafeteria. Then she is asked to take in June/Nina, a diminutive person in a kimono, who was no disturbance. Nina was 22, but already had a history: pregnant at 15; married; another child; escape; an encounter with Mr Arthur Purvis; pregnant again; and an abortion in Japan. Nina waited in readiness for a Mrs Winner to pick her up in a sleek black car and take her to Mr Purvis. When Nina plays sick, in order to make her escape, she asks our raconteur to take her place when Mr Purvis calls. She does. She is in for unexpected experiences, open only to young women 'On the way to deeds they didn't yet know they had in them'.

Marlene recounts Child's Play. 'My mother had a habit of hanging on to - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state'. At a summer camp on a lake she became friends with Charlene. The counsellor called them The Twins. Charlene made sure they were. They both had the gift of talking, endlessly.  They tried to top each other's stories. Charlene told her about secretly watching her brother, with his pimpled bum, fornicating with his girlfriend. Marlene could only share her tale of Verna, a neighbour who would stare at her, who went to Special Classes at her school. She embellished it, so that it was as if Verna had persecuted her. The last days of camp Verna appears with other Specials for a weekend. Will The Twins really seek revenge on her? The Twins do not meet again, if you can call it that, until Marlene gets a request to call on Charlene at Princess Margaret's hospital where she is dying of cancer.

'Fiction' is about a short story writer, Christie O'Dell, whose tale 'Kindertotenlieder' touches a raw nerve in Joyce.

The story within a story is partially recounted in 'Fiction'. Joyce bought a copy of 'How Are We to Live' because on the jacket it said the author had grown up in Rough River 'a small town on the coast of British Columbia'. Joyce and her husband Jon were the top two brightest students at their school in a factory town in Ontario. They could have had the gift of choice, but after university instead chose Rough River, where Joyce, a violinist and cellist, got a job teaching music. Jon went into woodwork and carpentry. He acquired an apprentice, 'Edie was like a pet ... her upper back was decorated with tattoos'. Edie was fundamentalist, dogmatic, and still Jon fell in love with her. 'A new beginning. Naked truth. Naked life'. Joyce became a professional cellist, married again and became the third wife of Matt, a neuropsychologist and amateur violinist. Their extended clan encompassed them. The people they interact with in this story have names resurrected in other contexts in other stories, like Sally and Marlene. She wonders what happened to Edie? She will go to the author's book signing with a box of chocolates. When in Rough River she had taught Edie's daughter, Christine, violin. Edie, having written 'Kindertotenlieder', is all of Rough River now lost to her, forgotten, dismissed, purged from her system, ejected in to a past to be forgotten?

Free Radicals is a story about confessing to a murder and getting away with it. Dimensions is about infanticide and seeking higher consciousness. Face considers how a man can live with half his face disfigured by becoming a successful radio reader, and how a girl his age tried to identify with him. In Some Women a man has leukemia and is slowly dying at home, yet he loves his wife Sylvia and only tolerates the other three women gyrating around him.

Too Much Happiness, the title story comes last, but not least. It traces the exploits of a mathematical genius, Sophia Kovalevski, who knew that science required 'great fantasy'. Sophia was also a novelist, and it was this aspect of her life that captivated Alice Munro.

The penultimate story, The Deserted Forest, known here as 'Wood' is on Roy, an artist in wood who becomes enthralled by the art of producing beautiful cord wood. Roy's clan 'didn't always enjoy each other's company, but ... made sure they got plenty of it'. His wife Lea remained on the fringes, reinforced by a debilitating illness.

This is fascinating, as are the other Munro tales. 'Now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times, how tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It is not a matter of one tree after another, it's all the trees together, aiding and abetting each other and weaving into one thing. A transformation behind your back' (page 245). Just like people.  e-mail sheridangriswold@yahoo.com