Dear Life: a review

I am often embarrassed to realise that I have two degrees in Literature and still so frequently find canonical titles or authors I haven't read. Until this book, Alice Munro was in that category. I am now a huge fan, and I look forward to making up for lost time. Mind you, my introduction to Munro was her final short story collection, Dear Life, for which she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps I should stop now and avoid having my high regard undermined (a la Ondaatje).

The truth is, I don't read a lot of short stories. I tend to prefer the depth of character, language, and plot that the spaciousness of a novel allows. With a writer as skilled as Munro, however, the short form is more than enough length to tell a story that is as rich and engaging as any novel.

Order Dear Life from your local book store
via bookmanager.com 

Dear Life is a collection of short stories from very specific Canadian places, yet they could be anywhere. Or at least in any small Canadian town. Perhaps there is a particular Canadian experience that translates from rural Ontario to British Columbia. I tend to think the provinces are more distinct than that, yet riding the train through the Rocky Mountains, or watching the leaves turn gold, then orange, then red in autumn certainly translates, as do Munro's characters.

Perhaps what feels odd about Munro's compelling but unusual characters is their ordinariness. While mildly antiquated, they are, in the main, relatable and irredeemably human. And yet they are distinctly themselves. The women, in particular, have a fullness that keeps them from being tropes or clichés.

I find Munro's style hard to identify. It is a style with depth but without flourish. More Coco Chanel than Thierry Mugler. Mostly, I just enjoyed spending my time in the world Munro created - it felt peaceful to find myself in each separate tale. Munro can be cynical, but without bitterness and in a forgiving and tender way. Dear Life comprises mainly love stories with too much reality to be saccharine or even all that romantic.

Alice Munro and I share a similar philosophy of truth, which is that there is truth, and there are facts, and we musn't let the latter distract from or dilute the former. In introducing her final four stories in this collection, Munro states ...

The final four works in thise book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life. 

The Finale - these four separate works - are not so dramatically different from the prior ten works of fiction. The style, the settings, and the characters very much relate across the whole collection. Perhaps that shows that writers write who they are, no matter what name they give their story. Perhaps I'm over-reaching.

Somehow, particularly in those final personal stories, Munro - more than a generation older and most of a very large country away - recalls for me a small farmhouse, a bend in a river, trees at the edge of a field, sisters in bunk beds, a listening father, an adolescent girl's impatience for her mother. Even the worst horrors are unveiled gently and only with as much detail as is absolutely necessary for understanding. Her realism is just that - neither glossy nor lurid, but clear.