Why You Should Read Alice Munro's "Dear Life"

After this year's Nobel Prize for Literature was announced I promptly went onto Amazon and ordered the first best title by Alice Munro ("Dear Life").  Much like I did last year when Mo Yan was announced to be the winner.

Whereas I'd heard of Alice Munro before, I'd never actually read anything by her. I wasn't even aware that she wrote a type of fiction I rather enjoy: short stories about the complications of ordinary human life. If this happy outcome appears to justify a process as arbitrary as blindly choosing a Nobel Prize Winner as my reading matter, I nevertheless think it requires a bit of explanation.

I think of it as a question: Why would I be so willing to buy and then spend my often limited reading time engaged in a title without knowing anything about either the author or the themes she explores? To say that it is because the Nobel Prize committee bestowed its highest honour on her would be only half the answer. The other half is down to my own evolution as a reader.

As a reader I have often willingly explored obscure titles and unknown writers in the hope of finding a hidden gem, picking up (so I told myself) the trail of thoughts and experiences spurned by the mainstream. Gems I did find, but the trouble, as many readers will know, is that the road less traveled does not always equate quality. Just as travel marketers can turn a little known coastline into the Next Big Holiday Destination, our minds ramp up the significance of the unusual into real outliers. It's our love of the exotic, the novel, and the counter-cultural that is being appealed to.

This is not to diss the inclination to find those diamonds in the rough. Not at all. It's just that I noticed that what I gained in novel perspectives I was beginning to sacrifice in an appreciation of rigorous formal quality. I was taking my eye off the ability to express and communicate clearly. I had discovered unique thoughts and experiences, but not always masters of the craft.

It was time to bring these two sides together so they could learn from each other. First, I had to realise the obvious: before me, others came, read, enjoyed, and delivered judgment. There are numerous reasons why Jane Austen is still sitting pretty, not least of which is that her works still have plenty to say to contemporary audiences. The depth provided by their historical perspective are a bonus, and her writing style, slick and sharp, continues to appear fresh and modern. Or Checkhov, one of the grandaddies of the modern short story, whose respected influence has him mentioned frequently in comparison to big names writing in that genre today. None more so than Alice Munro herself.

Secondly, I had to find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff in contemporary writing. This is a difficult undertaking when (a) I lack the time to read even a significant subset of eligible titles and (b) lack a coherent strategy when it comes to selecting from the titles touted by various online resources. It is difficult to discern commercial interests and twitter-friendly soundbites from personal taste, a fact made even more difficult when reviews tend to be on the shallow side despite using big words in bold strokes. How I long for the "close reading" espoused by my English Literature lecturers sometimes ...

Which inevitably loops back to the fact that outliers are usually ignored in the academic community - at least at first - so that those who are likely to provide serious commentary tend to pick better established titles and writers. With this admittedly simple logic in mind the big literary competitions like the Booker, the Nobel, the Pulitzer etc. offer very reasonable - if not guaranteed exciting - starting points. What they might lack in novelty they will almost certainly make up for in mastery of the craft and - or so I like to think - the writer's ability to tell a story. Plus, at least some serious analysts are likely to have provided their insights for the rest of us to ponder.

In short, as a writer, reading a Nobel Prize Winner offers the opportunity to learn from a master.

"Dear Life", the most recent published work by Alice Munro, turns out to be wonderfully instructive. There is much more to appreciate than "mere" good storytelling. Her stories are also explorations of consciousness and of memory, told with wistful sympathy and wisdom. If Chekhov comes to mind in the pristine and unsentimental crispness of her writing, Raymond Carver's influence can be found in her sympathetic treatment of a diverse array of characters.

There is also a cinematic quality to various childhood memories - never more so than in the autobiographical quartet of stories at the end - that reminded me of Andrei Tarkovski's evocative "Mirror". We know the memories are not always complete and trustworthy - the narrator often indicates her uncertainty about specific facts - but they have the authenticity of old photographs and reels of silent film.

What amazed me is the ease with which Munro weaves strands of memory and consciousness into a single thread. Other reviewers have already observed how these stories are mini-novels deserving of individual attention and reflection. The apparent effortlessness of the prose belies the complexity of the process.

And I've learned a lot. From the narrator's tone (reflective without judgment) to the writer's uncanny ability to bring those disparate memories into the same space of consciousness. How does she do it?

One of the techniques she employs so well is merging past and present. The past is present, as when she reminisces about a dance her mother took her to in Voices. She achieves the fusion with a beautiful sleight of hand. One moment we are in the past:

"I don't mean that she [my mother] spent all her time wishing that things weren't as they were [..] She couldn't even devise as much times as she otherwise would have done in being disappointed with me, wondering why I wasn't bringing the right kind of friends, or any friends at all, home from the town school [..] Or indeed why I had learned to blank out even the prodigious memory I once had for reciting poetry, refusing to use it ever again for showing off." - p.287

Then in the next sentence an incredible deftness brings a disparate consciousness into the same set of thoughts:

"But I am not always full of sulks and disputes. Not yet. Here I am when about ten years old, all eager to dress up and accompany my mother to a dance. 

The dance was being held in one of the altogether decent but not prosperous-looking houses on our road."

Notice the switch from past tense to present tense to past tense. Not a tense structure your English teacher is likely to have taught you! But in the hands of a master it is like a surgical incision that leaves no scars. I'm sure Anton Chekhov would be pleased.