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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Which living writers will be read 100 years from now?

Knockout stories by Alice Munro in her new collection, "Too Much Happiness," and what do you expect? She is a writer so accomplished, so dominant in her field - if you had to bet on which living writers (if any) will be read 100 years from now, wouldn't you put your money on Munro? All the more amazing in that she has such a narrow range of subject and style and has found so much depth, so much material, enough to create a life's work, a world. She almost exclusively writes stories (there is a novel in her life somewhere but nobody's read it), and they're all of a somewhat meandering style - I think she once aptly described it as entering a house and wandering through the rooms. They're not tight and symmetrical - the end is never easily forecast from the beginning, sometimes the focus of the story will even shift so the seeming protoagonist fades to the background. All of her stories set in either small-town Ontario (with occasional sidetrips to Toronto), often set some 40 years ago or in the presence but referencing back, or else in Vancouver/Vancouver Island - these being apparently the twin poles of Munro's life, one uptight and provincial and the other more relaxed, multicultural, west-coast hip (to a degree - this is Canada). Characters often young women trying to make sense of their lives - first love, first sex, first time in the city. Terrible things often happen, especially in the small farm towns. The first 3 stories in Too Much Happiness are great, and typical of Munro's late style - each an exemplar of one of the themes I noted above: one about a hotel maid whose husband is in a hospital for the criminally insane in small Ontario city, the next about a woman in Vancouver who comes across a story wirtten by child ex-husband's 2nd wife (this one very sly and funny, as the main character frets about whether the story is true to the facts of her life, something Munro must hear about all the time - a writer's view of how others see wriers), the 3rd about a young woman in Toronto introduced to a very odd subculture. These summaries do not do justice to the stories. Does Munro have a flaw? Yes - her titles, esp her book titles, are terrible.

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