‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’ by Alice Munro

The following are three linked stories by Alice Munro, about the life of Juliette, an intelligent successful woman and mother. In the story ‘Chance’, Juliette is a young post-graduate student travelling by bus and ferry to meet Eric, a man she had previously met on a train following the suicide of another passenger. In ‘Soon’, we see Juliette, now a young mother, of Penelope, returning to visit her parents and feeling out of place in their home, back in the small town of her childhood. She is soon reminded of the old-fashioned prejudice and hostility of neighbours that she experienced as an ambitious clever young woman, and how it has affected, and been accommodated by, her parents. In ‘Silence’, Juliette, is middle-aged and waiting for the return of an adult Penelope from a spiritual retreat, while it becomes increasingly clear that Penelope may never return to her.

“My father used to say of someone he disliked, that he had no use for that person. Couldn’t those words mean simply what they say? Penelope does not have a use for me. Maybe she can’t stand me. It’s possible.”

Juliette, in ‘Silence’, is the ultimate unreliable narrator, (especially since the real-life revelations of Alice Munro’s daughter in recent years) and possibly there is much that has been held back by Munro in these stories. Yet there is still a cautious careful exploration of the shame and damage suffered by women who go on to damage their daughters in turn. The three stories of Juliette show a whole life in glimpses: the moments of bad choices and irredeemable mistakes and the uneasy resignation of old age.

‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’ all first published in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here, here and here. All three collected in Runaway, Vintage, 2005, and then in New Selected Stories, 2011 and Lying under the Apple Tree, 2014

‘The Moons of Jupiter’ by Alice Munro

This Alice Munro story is about the distances that open up between people in a family. The narrator, Janet, has a strained relationship with her older daughter, Nichola, who she is rarely in touch with and misses very much. Janet doesn’t seem to understand why she and Nichola are not close, but later in the story she recounts an event from Nichola’s childhood in which Janet chose to go through the motions of care but withdrew love in order to protect herself. This feels like a very human, self-preserving thing to do, but it has disastrous long-term consequences. This is a deeply affecting story — made even more so by the fact it feels impossible to read any work by Alice Munro and not acknowledge the fact she ignored the abuse of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner for years.

First published in The New Yorker in May 1978 and available online for subscribers to read here; collected in The Moons of Jupiter, Macmillan, 1982; also in Selected Stories, 1996, Vintage Munro, 2004, and Carried Away, 2006

‘Postcard’ by Alice Munro

Munro, who recently died, is rightly singled out as an expert in telling short stories that capture the passing of time in all its guises – present, past and future. In ‘Postcard’, she uses present tense, flashback and foreshadowing. The specificity around time is set from the opening so we know where we are, the character voice of Helen and the first mention of Clare.

“Yesterday afternoon, yesterday, I was going along the street to the Post Office, thinking how sick I was of snow, sore throats, the whole dragged-out tail end of winter, and I wished I could pack off to Florida, like Clare.”

Munro introduces us further to Clare using a delightful conversation between Clare and Helen’s mother – so much efficient character building through dialogue. ‘Postcard’ is not just about a romantic break up and the way Clare breaks up with Helen. There’s also the relationship between Helen and her mother and the damage of cruel social judgement particularly towards women by women: “But once a man loses his respect for a girl, he is apt to get tired of her.”

Here’s a sharp description of Clare: “He was a fat, comfortable, sleepy-faced man.” We know what we should think of Clare.

Such a beautiful and harsh delving into loss and heartbreak where there is little comfort extended, except by Alma who doesn’t want Helen to eat lunch on her own.

First published in Dance of the Happy Shades, Ryerson Press, 1968, and collected in Selected Stories, McClelland and Stewart, 1996/ Vintage, 1997

‘Lying Under the Apple Tree’ by Alice Munro

The social layers of a small town are revealed to us through the eyes of an adolescent girl whose parents consider themselves a cut above some others in the town, though they are not very much so, really. She is kind of a loner, doesn’t like people to classify her or say anything about her. To get a feeling of freedom her pastime is to go cycling out through the countryside. She admires the blossoming trees in an orchard and has an irresistible urge to lie down under one of the magnificent apple trees and look up towards the sky. The owner appears, a woman who has stables alongside for keeping and training horses, and chases her away. Our girl admires a lad who plays in a Salvation Army band in the town with other members of his family. She stands and listens to them and later the boy gets talking to her. They start going cycling together out in the country. The same lad works with horses for the owner of the stables and the orchard. This is a story in which so much happens, a dramatic encounter, and the subsequent lives of the characters are summarised. And that’s fine. Short stories do not have to be confined to one time or very few events. Some of Alice Monro’s stories if they appeared today might be marketed like novels, as Claire Keegan’s are, for example.

First published in The New Yorker, 2002, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The View from Castle Rock, 2006 and New Selected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 2011

‘Friend of My Youth’ by Alice Munro

How virtue slips into the weaponisation of virtue, how storytelling slips into the weaponisation of storytelling. It’s one I’d do well to pay a lot of attention to, I feel. It’s also just a great story, quite unusually and yet, I think, very naturally framed.

Makes me think of another one I’ve long loved, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s ‘In a Bamboo Grove’.

First published in The New Yorker in 1990, and collected in the book of the same name that same year. It’s available to New Yorker subscribers, and non-subscribers who haven’t used up their monthly free quota, on their website. Also collected in Selected Stories, McLelland and Stewart, 1996 and Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Stories, Everyman, 2008

‘Family Furnishings’ by Alice Munro

Strayed led me to Munro, whose portrayals of dreamy and isolated, somewhat cold and ambitious women were ideal for my undergraduate years.

This particular story is about a girl coming of age in rural Ontario, dissatisfied with her provincial roots and fascinated by a cousin of her father’s, Alfrida. Alfrida has left for the big city, though that departure has come with the disillusionment that many of Munro’s women suffer. There is a momentum to this story, a sense that there is something to be worked out, that keeps the reader going until the end, where the concluding shock is delivered with grace. But it’s also about the ruthlessness it takes to write about your family.

“If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you’ve told it, and it has done so, there has to be a balmy moment of power.”

Published in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, McClelland & Stewart, 2001, and collected in New Selected Stories, 2011, and Family Furnishings, Knopf, 2014

‘Amundsen’ by Alice Munro

I thought I’d read this story decades ago, but it turns out to only have been published in 2012, so I suppose it’s become mixed-up with one or more other Munro stories from over the years. She is such an encompassing presence that the stories do seem to merge together into a sense of a single person, a kindly presence who has known great sorrow and is far more passionate than she appears.

‘Amundsen’ tells the tale of a young teacher arriving in a small Canadian town to work in the classroom of a sanatorium dedicated to those suffering from tuberculosis. It has the precise world-building of a refined historical novel but that’s only the background – the foreground, of the narrator and the doctor with whom she falls in love – is told with an exquisite eye for gesture, nuance and speech and what they say about character. It’s an utterly delightful and softly tragic thing, as are all the Munro stories I’ve read.

PS: I’ve just looked Munro up on Wikipedia, and I find the bookshop she founded with her first husband James is still open. It’s a grandly opulent place, oddly out of keeping with her stories. The website is https://www.munrobooks.com

First published in The New Yorker. Collected in Dear Life, Chatto & Windus, 2012

‘Gravel’ by Alice Munro

“I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.”

A remembered life, as Munro reminds us in this exquisite meta-fictional story, bears as much resemblance to the truth as we allow it. From the relative sanctuary of adulthood, the narrator trawls her childhood, a terrain of innocence and naivety, to make sense of a nebulous, tragic event and its attendant guilt. She recalls playing with her older sister and the family dog, moving into a trailer beside a gravel pit with a new step-father, their mother pregnant. A wolf loiters at the edge of the narrative. Beyond this, we are uncertain what to trust, as the fragility of memory blurs into a series of constructs that ponder the nature of storytelling itself.

First published in The New Yorker, June 2011, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Dear Life, McClelland & Stewart Limited, 2012

‘Tricks’ by Alice Munro

And to finish: Munro. Her short stories defy the form’s very own laws: “a glimpse of something viewed from the corner of the eye,” V.S. Pritchett tells us; “a certain unique or single effect,” Edgar Allan Poe instructs, while Carver emphasises narrative compactness too: “Get in. Get out. Don’t Linger. Move on.” ‘Tricks’ is slender, yes, (at just over thirty pages it’s not butting up against the ‘novella’ tag) but – as with so many of Munro’s works – it carries a disproportionate heft. Instead of singular ‘glimpses’, abrupt entrances and exits, characters are observed and felt at multiple points in space and time – whole lives fanning out in front of us amid remarkable sworls of detail (the name of the thing and the name of thing before it became the thing, an almost geological approach…). And yet, in spite of their stature, Munro’s characters feel stealthily – almost mystically – remote.

‘Tricks’ spans forty years of Robin’s life: her burdened youth (her asthmatic, snipy sister); her romance with Danilo, a Montenegrin who repairs clocks – the door opening to a new world of change, “the risk of her life”: “I will be here next summer in the same place,” Danilo promises. “The same shop. I will be there by June at the latest.” And then an interlude in Robin’s sixties (her hair, once “dark”, now “charcoal-gray”) in which she nurses patients at ‘The Sunset Hotel’, the town’s psychiatric ward. The story is in playful dialogue with As You Like It(Robin’s annual escape from her “makeshift, temporary’ existence sees her take a trip by train to see a Shakespeare play) but even though there’s a tying up of loose ends – the outing of confusion in the story’s final phase – ‘Tricks’ is less a comedy, more a troubling meditation on the incalculable impact of slights of fate, the longevity of shame, the stark disjunction between our public and private selves.

First published in Runaway, Vintage, 2019

‘Dear Life’ by Alice Munro

The final and titular story of Munro’s 2012 collection involves a woman and her mother in Southern Ontario, Munro’s home territory. Munro is known for dealing with the layers that make up the ordinary and this story works with threads of memory to show how perception changes over time. It opens “I lived when I was young at the end of a long road. Or a road that seemed long to me.” Munro said that the final four stories in the collection are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”. Certainly, this story establishes the reflective voice of the author/narrator in tension with her mother who imparts her impressions of the people around them. As readers we have to make our own judgements.

First published in The New Yorker, September 2011, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Dear Life, Chatto and Windus, 2012

‘Lichen’ by Alice Munro

I adore Alice Munro, so a story by her was an absolute must. But which one when she has written so many superb stories over a long career dedicated to the form? After much deliberation, I came to a shortlist of three: ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ and ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’ from her debut collection, and this story from The Progress of Love. Like the other stories in the collection, it explores the mysterious, unpredictable, and multifaceted nature of love. Love is complicated, Munro amply illustrates, is often illogical and contrary, seldomly does it meet our expectations, and it stubbornly refuses to fit comfortably into our lives. Stella is visited by her serially unfaithful, conceited, and misogynistic husband David (whom she has been separated from for many years yet remains married to and still loves) and his current girlfriend (the delicate Catherine whom we find out David is also cheating on), at Stella’s old, family summer house on the shore of Lake Huron. Masterfully rendered through an ever-exacting eye, an acute ear for dialogue, and an abundance of compassion for her characters, as with many of Alice Munro’s stories, she is able to achieve in a few thousand words the complexity and density of a novel.

First published in The New Yorker, July 1985 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Progress Of Love, Douglas Gibson, 1986/Chatto & Windus, 1987; also in Selected Stories, McClelland Stewart, 1996

‘Friend of My Youth’ by Alice Munro

Alice Munro is so beloved by short story writers – so canonized, admired, studied, sanctified – that it’s easy to forget what a deeply strange writer she can be. Friend of My Youth – the book, and the title story – came out as I was graduating from my MFA program. It was probably the first Munro story that I read over and over, trying to see how it was constructed. It begins in dreams – the narrator dreaming of her mother, now dead, alive and healthy – and then follows her mother to her youth, and then to a farm where she boarded as a young school teacher. Time, as is often is the case in Alice Munro stories, is a series of trap doors. The very ending is so strange, and yet so breathtaking, that I will leave it there for you to discover. There are stories that I love that are easily explicable, but the stories on my list for A Personal Anthology aren’t. Perhaps I wanted to make things hard for myself. Perhaps I only want you to read them. Here’s a mystery; please don’t solve it.

First published in The New Yorker January 14, 1990; collected in Friend of My Youth, Knopf/Vintage, 1990, and Selected Stories, 1997

‘The Beggar Maid’ by Alice Munro

Munro was the first writer I found who described romantic relationships with the accuracy I needed – she gave me words with which to understand my own experiences. I have found more writers like this since, thank god, but she remains far and away the best. If I ever do a PhD, it’ll be on her. In ‘The Beggar Maid’, Patrick, a young, handsome academic falls in love with Rose, the protagonist, who loves him back sometimes and at other times can’t stand him. Rose’s inner life and the dialogue feel so truthful, and it’s this which makes me always come back to Munro. She sees the complexities of relationships so clearly, and the intensity of her characters’ emotions is never misplaced. Everything feels absolutely real. She’s a genius and I think one of the best writers to read if you want to learn to write relationships properly. Give her the Nobel. Oh, wait.

First published in The New Yorker, June 1977, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Who Do You Think You Are, Macmillan, 1978, and also in No Love Lost, 2003 and Selected Stories Vol 1, Vintage, 1997/2021

‘Baptizing’ by Alice Munro

In Munro’s first short story collection, Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan, wildly bright and stuck in rural Ontario, is trying to win a scholarship to college: “I got A’s at school,” she says, “I never had enough of them”. In one of the final stories, she falls for a boy, the excellently-named Garnet French, and it’s love at first sight. Munro’s version of love at first sight is far sexier than I’d have guessed before reading her; it is something to lose yourself in. At church, Del and Garnet’s hands touch and she is in ecstasy: “I felt angelic with gratitude, truly as if I had come out onto another level of existence.” This story of sexual awakening is perfectly done: “Sex seemed to me all surrender… not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, an act of pure faith” – but of course it ends badly. There’s a bittersweet pain, facing the end of love and an uncertain future, but Del makes the best of it, understanding that what’s happened is part of growing up. She knows, as she says, that “real life awaits”. I can’t think of anyone who writes better than Munro about this transition from naïve adolescent to shrewd young woman.

First published in Lives of Girls and Women, 1971, Vintage