Friday, April 30, 2010
The scariest story you'll ever read - Alice Munro
Alice Munro's story "Child's Play," in "Too Much Happiness," is about as powerful and scary a story as you'll ever read. It's a story about a haunting, in a sense, but in no way a ghost story or a horror story; it's about how one horrifying incident from childhood can haunt a woman (two women, in this case) throughout their lives. This haunting is persistent theme in Munro's recent fiction, but reaches its pinnacle here (Spoiler!): two girls at summer camp intentionally drown a mentally disabled camper and tell nobody. As you read it, part of you says: why should they suffer so much? They were only children. Children make mistakes. And part says: They were monsters! Children know better. How cruel, how criminal! Munro offers no judgment. She describes the childhood memory (it's told in first person) in some detail, but the adult lives - the women are now in their 60s or so - are just sketched in, just enough so that we see how this horrible childhood incident has wounded them (particularly the narrator) and altered the course of their whole lives. We actually never know whether either of the women has ever confessed to the crime (other than through what we're reading). Story recalls a much longer, more gruesome story on similar theme by AS Byatt and the excellent novel Atonement (MacEwan), but what they told at great length Munro accomplishes with quick strokes, almost like a sketch. (This seems a peculiarly Brit-Canadian theme; do U.S authors write about childhood guilt in the same way?) My only quibble with the story: the meandering journey that leads the narrator from her friend's sickbed to the cathedral in Guelph where she may or may not "confess" to the crime - Munro could have ended the story in the hospital, I think. (The next story in the collection, Wood, is a dull afterthought, one of the few in which Munro strains for effect.)
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Hi. it was so enjoyable for me to read your writing. I've recently finished reading the book. I adore munro, her stories has something more than a surprise for me, something more as a permanent effect that lasts forever inside of me. the pain that goes to you through her stories, is like the pain that the characters carry themselves, just like the pain, the inconvenience, the sorrow that Marlene holds through her whole life. I loved the stories: Fiction, Dimensions, Deep-holes,( even Wood that you didn't like much),... but this one, Child's Play was my favorite.I haven't exaggerated if I say the story changed my life! and I agree with you at the highest degree that it's as powerful and scary a story as you'll ever read. As you say, it's about an incident haunting two women's life, wounding them. But the point, that makes it even more scary, is that there is nothing to do with that, as munro writes herself in the story " It's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done" It seemed to me that it was an inevitable happening, especially in Marlene's life, to drown the girl. something, sort of a crime, has been committed, and there is nothing to be done with that. No matter of hiding it ( " I am sure we never said anything as banal, as insulting or unnecessary, as DON'T TELL.") ,even no matter of confessing it. Here is the story of a woman that " the word "buddy" makes her uncomfortable ", that will always hold the look of the retarded girl on her whole life. After all these years there is no way to"become a different person"
ReplyDeleteAnyway, there are much more things to say about the story, but I think It's a quality of munro's stories that there are things cannot be explained clearly. No better words to explain them rather than the story itself.
Again thank you for your note and put your pleasure in common. And sorry for my poor English. As I'm Iranian, I'm not very good at English.