In all the political hubbub currently on this side of the 49th parallel, it's quite understandable that the newest Nobel laureate for Literature, from the other side of the 49th parallel, has rated only a few comments on DK, rather than a full diary. This one modestly attempts to correct that omission. The Nobel Prize announcement this past Thursday summarizes Alice Munro crisply:
"master of the contemporary short story"
Canadians have special reason to be proud of Munro's Nobel win, as she is the second Canadian-born Nobel Literature laureate (the first to spend her entire career in Canada, which Saul Bellow did not do) and the first Canadian woman to win the prize. As is usual with the announcements of the "Swedish Prizes", congratulations and praise have been rolling in for Alice Munro, and certainly not just in Canada. One example is from fellow writers A.S. Byatt, Anne Enright, and Colm Tóibín
here in
The Guardian. In keeping with the SNLC theme, however, one particularly loserly reaction came from an American author, of which more later.
One description that I've read about Munro's stories is from a short story (with a few novellas) anthology that I bought in college, The Borzoi Book of Short Fiction. It had one story by AM, "How I Met My Husband", which basically tells you how many AM short stories that I've read. Hence a slight unease on self's part in tackling this diary. More below the flip.....
Starting with Canadian reaction to AM's Nobel win, the CBC had this feature from its page, with this CBC Books page dedicated to her. From the CBC article, New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Munro's editor for 10 years, gave this summary about Munro's work:
"Her work is very provincial in that it's based in small towns and rural parts of Canada for the most part. At the same time, what she does with the characters in those places is show us their universality, their humanity."
The Globe and Mail has
this article by Jared Bland and Sandra Martin, which has a similar description:
"While it may be said that Ms. Munro has stuck simply to what she does, what she does is in no way simple - though, on the surface, it sometimes seems so: Her stories, frequently set in Southern Ontario, are often accounts of domestic situations and working-class people. But beyond their surface familiarity, they are deeply psychological explorations of the complexities of contemporary existence."
John Degen, executive director of the Writers' Union of Canada, noted generally about Canadian literature and its risks of appearing "provincial":
"For a long time, it was a struggle for Canadian writers to write about Canadian topics and to be small-townish."
From
The Guardian, fellow Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has
this article with an edgier description of Munro's subject matter:
"It's this small-town setting that features most often in her stories - the busybodies, the snobberies, the eccentrics, the cutting of swelled heads down to size, and the jeering at ambitions, especially artistic ones....
Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro's characters, just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that. Munro chronicles failure much more often than she chronicles success, because the task of the writer has failure built in. In this she is a romantic: the visionary gleam exists, but it can't be grasped, and if you drivel on about it openly the folks in the grocery store will think you're a lunatic."
In a sense, though, chronicling failure isn't that unique, certainly not in American literature, where failure is one of the great running themes (i.e. chasing the 'American dream' and such). The
Borzoi Book summary of Munro's writing has a more "political" tinge, fitting for DK:
"Her delicately observed and carefully crafted narratives often center on the problems of women with high aspirations trapped by provincial mores, social pressures, and subtly or grossly oppressive men."
Citation: David H. Richter (ed.), The Borzoi Book of Short Fiction, p. 1139, Alfred A. Knopf (1983).
From "How I Met My Husband", I definitely got those vibes of small-town provincial thinking in the attitudes of the Peebles family, particularly the matriarch, towards Edie, one of their hired hands on their farm. Edie gets involved with a visiting airplane pilot, with ensuing complications. But in spite of the story's title, the story doesn't end the way the title and the slight plot giveaway that I've indicated would expect you to lead. In fact, the title "question" is addressed in the story in almost a throwaway manner.
I will honestly admit that from reading "How I Met My Husband", I thought that it was OK, but I wasn't particularly blown away by it. If I make the effort down the line to read more of her stories, I might have to do it in small doses.
One American writer, to get to the loserly part mentioned pre-flip, who was singularly unimpressed by Munro's Nobel win is Bret Easton Ellis, as reported in The Independent here. Ellis tweeted his reaction thus:
"Alice Munro is so completely overrated. Alice Munro was always an overrated writer and now that she's won the Nobel she always will be. The Nobel is a joke and has been for ages."
The mean-spiritedness of Ellis aside, he actually does bring up a valid point about some past choices of Nobel Literature laureates. I should also acknowledge that I've never actually read any of Ellis' work, so I'm not in a valid position to comment on the quality of his writing vs. Munro, or any Nobel laureate. My guess is that Ellis would rank considerably lower, but that's just a guess. (One UK commentator who agrees with Ellis, in a more methodical manner, is Christian Lorentzen at the
London Review of Books here.) However, many other Tweeters have taken the trouble to hit back at Ellis, as noted on
this CBC Your Community Blog post, where, for one, Andrea Butler (@Bangieflea) noted:
"Bret Easton Ellis has no Nobel prize btw"
Plus, currently, Munro is obviously outselling Ellis on Amazon (US and Canada), thanks to the Nobel effect. That'll settle down after a while, of course. And granted, if I were to take the plunge and read more of Munro's stories, I don't know how I'd react. I might even be partly in sympathy with Lorentzen, or even Ellis to some degree, if without Ellis' viciousness. The reaction will have to wait for the time if/when I do take the plunge.
But in the meantime, congratulations from DK to Alice Munro, and don't spend the 8,000,000 SEK all in one place :) . The timing also works out well with her announcement earlier this year that she was done with writing fiction. Not a bad retirement cushion to receive, although no doubt the royalties will uptick just a bit with the Nobel announcement, and subsequent sales of her books. (Per OANDA today, 8,000,000 SEK = $1,280,790 CDN.)
So now, at the end of all this, you can either:
(a) Chit-chat about Alice Munro and her books, or
(b) Observe the usual SNLC protocol (regulars know what it is, or newbies can figure it out from the tip jar).
Or you can do both. The two options aren't mutually exclusive :) .