Alice Munro's TOO MUCH HAPPINESS

Book publishers usually consider short stories the work of the beginner—M.F.A. finger-exercises they reluctantly agree to publish only if they can promise on the flyleaf that the writer is “currently working on a novel.” This commercial capitulation to the fact that most readers prefer novels to short stories--along with the assumption that a big work of fiction is more important than a collection of small ones--is so powerful and pervasive that few writers are able to resist it.

That Alice Munro, who has been able to resist it for eleven collections of short stories, has become one of the most highly praised writers of the last half of the twentieth century should therefore go a long way toward redeeming the neglected short form. Over thirty years ago, when her one novel was called “only a collection of short stories,” she wasn’t bothered, saying she didn’t feel that a novel was any step up from a short story. To her credit, she has never wavered from that judgment.

In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.

With remarkable unanimity, reviewers, critics, and fellow authors agree that Alice Munro is the best short-story writer in the world today, (Her only competition for this title might be William Trevor) often justifying this assessment by arguing that the numerous characters and multiplicity of events in her stories make them somehow novelistic. However, Munro has always insisted that she does not write as a novelist does, that when she is writing a short story she gets a kind of tension she needs, like pulling on a rope attached to some definite place, whereas with a novel, everything goes “flabby.” Characters and events don’t really matter in her stories, she says, for they are subordinated to an overall “climate” or “mood.” In Munro’s best work, the hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere and tone, is always about something more enigmatic and unspeakable than the story generated by characters and what happens next. Her greatest stories simply do not communicate as novels do.

Munro once insisted, “I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a short story.” On another occasion, she used a metaphor to describe this short-story excitement. “I can get a kind of tension when I’m writing a short story, like I’m pulling on a rope and I know where the rope is attached. With a novel, everything goes flabby.” Munro says she doesn’t seem to be able to write in any other way. “I guess that’s why I don’t write a novel. God knows I still keep trying. But there always comes a point where everything seems to be getting really flat. You don’t feel the tension…I don’t feel this pulling on the rope to get to the other side that I have to feel.” Munro added, “People have suggested this is because I want to be able to manage everything and that I fear loss of control…. I have to agree that I fear loss of control. But I don’t think it’s anything as simple as that.”

Munro has said that when she reads a story she does not take it up at the beginning and follow it like a road “with views and neat diversions along the way.” Rather, for her, reading a story is like moving through a house, making connections between one enclosed space and another. Consequently, Munro declares, “When I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure.” She admits that the word “feeling” is not very precise, but that if she tries to be more intellectually respectable she will be dishonest. Rather than being concerned with character or cause-and-effect consequence, Munro says she wants the “characters and what happens subordinated to a climate,” by which, she says, she means something like “mood.” “What I like is not to really know what the story is all about. And for me to keep trying to find out.” What makes a story interesting, she says, is the “thing that I don’t know and that I will discover as I go along.

I have written about Munro in more detail in another place, especially the common critical view (mistaken, I think) that Munro’s stories are “novelistic’ (“Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?” Wascana Review 38 (2003): 16-28. I did a blog entry on the story “Wenlock Edge” in this new collection last February). I will thus only raise one issue about this new book—the thematic significance of the title, which originated with Munro’s discovery of the 19th-century Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky while looking for something else in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The title story focuses on the last few days before Kovalevsky died of pneumonia contracted during a cold wet trip from Paris to Stockholm, where she held a chair in mathematics, the first woman to hold such a professorship in European history. Kovalevsky’s seemingly contradictory talents led Munro to a biography by Don H. Kennedy and his wife entitled Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (1983), which quotes Kovalevsky’s last words at four o’clock in the morning on February 10, 1891: “Too much happiness.” Kovalevsky has been looking forward to the future, having received recognition for her work in an era when woman were not thought to be capable of higher mathematical thinking. She is also happily anticipating her forthcoming marriage to Maxsim Kovalesky, a distant relation and a professor of law--a great bear of a man who offers her comfort and security. Although the title of the story may suggest that Kovalevsky has so much happiness her death is a tragedy, it also may suggest her acceptance of the fact that happiness cannot be separated from unhappiness.

Indeed, the inextricability of happiness and unhappiness may be the thematic web that Munro weaves throughout many of the stories in this collection, especially since several reviewers have already suggested that there is much more violence in these stories than in Munro’s previous work: Two young girls murder an abhorred playmate; a man kills his children because he thinks his wife has walked out on him; a woman dying of cancer is threatened in her home by a man who has murdered his family. However, in keeping with the theme of “too much happiness,” or happiness bound up with unhappiness, the horror in these stories is often balanced by some compensatory acceptance. For example in “Dimensions,” although the central character’s insane bullying husband has killed their children, she understands that he knows their life and their children better than anyone else and goes to visit him in an asylum. Moreover, the story ends with a random rescue and a kind of personal salvation that seems somehow poetically just.

“Free Radicals” is also about a bittersweet confrontation that ends with poetic justice. The central character who has cancer and whose husband has recently died, has her home invaded by a man who shows her pictures of his parents and sister that he has recently murdered. In spite of the fact that she knows the cancer will kill probably her, she clings to life and tries to gain the intruder’s sympathy by telling him how she has been guilty of a crime in her past. However, the story is a lie, a fiction in which she takes on the role of her husband’s wronged first wife who is going to poison the other woman. Telling her that what he did was not so underhanded as what she did, the murderer leaves, only to be killed in a car accident.

Although in the last forty years the short story has been characterized first by experimentation and then by attenuation, Alice Munro has continued to go her own way, so confident of the nature of the short story and her control of the form that she needs to observe no trends nor imitate no precursors. Certainly she does not write in a vacuum, clearly aware of those short-story masters who have preceded her--Chekhov, Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, Sherwood Anderson--but Munro has found her own unique rhythm and controls it consummately. Although a Munro story might initially appear to be novelistic, her stories are deceptive; they lull the reader into a false sense of security in which time seems to comfortably stretch out like everyday reality, only to suddenly turn and tighten so intensely that the reader is left breathless.

The secret of Alice Munro’s short stories is that she is able to suggest universal, unspoken human desires by describing what seems to be ordinary everyday reality. Her stories are complex and powerful not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination.

More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today. If there is any justice and judgment in matters literary, she should redeem the short story from its second-class status single-handedly.

No Comfort in the End

Here's something I wrote while I was filming a City Council meeting. It was really just a delivery device for an idea I had... So, please to enjoy.

Her cell phone bleated an old tune for a TV show that let her know the person on the other end was her older brother. When they were little, he used to watch that show religiously and in all the years from then to now, it reminded her ever of him. The song started over once more by the time she picked it up, pressed the button, and put the receiver to her ear.

"Hello?" she said, immediately.

"Hey sis," her brother replied, warmly, "How's things?"

"Things are good," she began as she stood up and pulled her knit sweater sleeve up over her elbow with her free hand. "It's been quiet, generally. Jim's been gone for work a lot and the kids have been in school for a couple of months now, so it's mainly just been me and dad."

"Dad isn't making a lot of noise?" he chuckled.

"No..." She got up from her chair and made her way to the front door.

"How's he doing?"

"He's doing good. He has good days and not so good days, but more good days than bad lately, so that's been helpful."

"How's he doing with medication? Is it the same stuff he's on?"

"Yeah, they upped the dosage but it's the same stuff."

"And it's slowing down?"

"I think so, maybe. You can never really tell with Ahlzheimers. That's what they keep telling me anyway. It's all so frustrating one way or the other."

"How do you mean?"

"It's like he's there, but he's not. His attitude, his personality are there sometimes, but it's almost like his eyes are hollow and he just doesn't understand where or who he is." She finished her sentence and turned the knob on the door so she could take the walk out into the crisp Autumn twilight.

"I feel like a jackass hearing that."

Before he could explain, she asked him, "Why?"

"I feel like I should be the one taking care of him."

"You didn't saddle me with him or anything. I wanted to take him."

"I know, but... I just feel like I should be there."

"I won't argue that you can always be here more, but you're seven-hundred miles away. I understand why you're not here more."

"If he needs me--if you need me--I'll be there in a heart beat."

"I know."

There was a pause as neither brother nor sister knew what to say.

She shuffled her feet through a red-orange thicket of leaves beneath her tree on the gray sidewalk in front of her house.

"So what's he do with his time?"

"Oh, this and that. He used to do a lot of crossword puzzles, but those got too difficult for him, so he does word searches a lot now. He watches a lot of movies."

"He always did that, though."

"Yeah. But the hardest part of it is putting on one of his favorite movies and having him ask me if he's ever seen it before. I put on, what was that war movie... the dozen? the one with Kojak..."

"The Dirty Dozen."

"Yeah. He's watched it for the first time about twenty times this month."

"Oh."

"And he always wants to watch John Wayne movies, but every time I put in a John Wayne movie, he doesn't recognize John Wayne--"

"--really?"

"Yeah. And then, he gets pissy at me that I didn't put in a John Wayne movie. It's so damned exasperating sometimes."

"I can imagine."

"And he just can't do jigsaw puzzles. I tried to help him with them, but I would just end up getting too frustrated and mad at him and it's not his fault, so then I feel guilty and Jim has to put up with me crying myself to sleep."

"How's Jim dealing with all of this?"

"It's been getting easier on him. He and dad never got along and it's always been a source of tension for him to have him in the house all the time, and he's sort of... coming to terms with the idea that this isn't really Dad anymore. I think it's easier for him to deal with it for the same reason it's harder for me."

"It's hard to realize that it's not him so much anymore. It's what's left of what he used to be and it kills me that it's fallen solely on you to make him comfortable."

She paced back and forth through the leaves, "Do you know who Dr. Hanauer is?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Dad keeps asking about him."

"That was the family doctor for years. He delivered the both of us. I think he retired just after you were born. I remember seeing him a few times as a kid."

"Why was he asking about him, do you think?"

"I think maybe it's just a matter of comfort. It's no secret that you older you get the more comfortable you like to be and Dr. Hanauer was his doctor for thirty years before he retired."

"I guess that makes sense."

"Hm. I never really thought about it like that before. You spend thirty years getting completely comfortable with your doctor and he retires right when you'd want to be able to rely on him the most. When you're set in your ways, you need to find a new doctor or, Hell, even a team of doctors."

"It's frightening when you put it like that."

"Maybe it is."

"Well, I should get back in there. His movie's ending soon."

"All right. You take care, sis."

"You too."

"Let me know if you need anything."

"I will."

"Bye-bye."

Best Short Story Collections for 2009

It’s that time again, when the scramble to sell dominates the Christian world. And, of course, the diminishing world of books is no exception. It is no accident that struggling newspapers provide lists of “Best” books surrounded by ads for books and bookstores. What more respectable gift to give than a book? It shows you know some stuff, right? And what are the best books to give? Well, if you do not know enough stuff, you surely cannot go wrong if you choose books that The New York Times calls “Notable” or “Best,” that The LA Times calls “Favorite,” and that the San Francisco Chronicle calls its “Gift Guide.” Here is a summary of some of the most influential lists of short story collections of 2009. Of course there were more novels than short story collections on all the lists, but, as you can see, over a dozen short story collections got good reviews and made the important “buy me! buy me!” lists for the end of the year.

I love the short story and want to encourage readers to read the form. However, I must admit, I cannot see how some of the following can be called “Best,” although they might be called “Favorite.” I have referenced those collections that I have commented on in previous blogs if you are interested. But in short, the three I most agree on as being “Best” are Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson, Once the Shore by Paul Yoon, and Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. I do not for the life of me understand how anyone could place Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry, Jay McInerney’s How It Ended, and Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in lists of the Best of 2009.


New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy
Do Not Deny Me, Jean Thompson
Don’t Cry, Mary Gaitskill
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower
How It Ended, Jay McInerney
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon
My Father’s Tears, John Updike
Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro
Nothing Right, Antonya Nelson
Once the Shore, Paul Yoon
Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro

That’s a good dozen. Not a bad showing for the short story this year. Of the twelve, one made it to the Top Ten List: Maile Meloy’s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.
Michiko Kakutani put Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned on the top ten, and Janet Maslin put Jay McInerney’s How It Ended on her top ten. Can that be right? God help us!

Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2009

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
It’s Beginning to Hurt, James Lasdun
Love in Infant Monkeys, Lydia Millet
Once the Shore, Paul Yoon
The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro

San Francisco Gift Guide for 2009

Best American Short Stories: 2009
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
John Cheever’s Collected Stories
Raymond Carver’s Collected Stories
My Father’s Tears, John Updike
Best American Mystery Stories
Detective Stories

Atlantic Books of the Year 2009

It’s Beginning to Hurt, James Lasdun

Atlantic Runners up 2009

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro


Boston Globe

Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
Look at the Birdie, Kurt Vonnegut
Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro

Christian Science Monitor

The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Library Journal

It’s Beginning to Hurt, James Lasdun

Kansas City Star

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon
The Maple Stories, John Updike
Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro

I have commented on the following collections on previous blog postings:

Don’t Cry, Mary Gaitskill, June 27 blog
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, March 24 blog
How It Ended, Jay McInerney, August 14
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin, February 13 blog
Love and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon, April 27 blog
Nothing Right, Antonya Nelson, January 29 blog
Once the Shore, Paul Yoon, November 23 blog

I have just finished reading Alice Munro’s new book Too Much Happiness and will post a blog on it next week.

I have not had a chance to read the following from 2009, but plan to read them in the next few weeks and post some thoughts on them:

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy
Do Not Deny Me, Jean Thompson
It’s Beginning to Hurt, James Lasdun
Best American Short Stories: 2009

I have not forgotten that I have still not got around to commenting on three books from the 2008 lists, but I will try to get to them in the next couple of months.

Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollack
The Boat, Nam Le
Yesterday’s Weather, Ann Enright

Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Charles