For Alice Munro, short story centered on the moment of catharsis, thrill of the unexpected

Often referred to as the ‘Canadian Chekhov,’ Munro’s work was noted for its psychological acuity, depth of characterization and unpretentious language. Throughout her six-decade writing career, her stories featured characters from agricultural communities in and around her native Ontario; her own father was a fox-and-mink farmer (his life was described in some detail in the autobiographical story ‘Working for a Living’). Munro was very, very good at depicting the coming-of-age of girls and young women, especially the conflicts between their inner and outer lives. The older women in her stories often went through a process of finding newfound purpose and a sense of authenticity in middle age, shrugging off sexist and misogynist attitudes directed at them.

Following Munro’s passing, many social media users shared clippings of an old newspaper article from the 60s, wherein she was described as a housewife who “found time” to write short stories — an apt summation of the mainstream sexist views of that era.

Irony and sincerity: the best of both worlds

One of Munro’s biggest strengths as a writer was her uncanny ability to blend an old-school, languorous descriptive voice with a more contemporary, irony-laden register. This allowed her to lend that extra bit of compassion to superficially unlikeable characters, whose backstories would reveal the source of their vulnerabilities and neuroses. This is exemplified by my personal favourite Munro story, the titular tale from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), later adapted into a film called Hateship, Loveship (2013).

In this story, two precocious teenaged girls, Sabitha and Edith, write phony love letters between the former’s father, Ken, and Johanna Parry, housekeeper to Sabitha’s grandfather Mr McCauley. Ken is introduced to readers as an apathetic dimwit, because that’s the way Sabitha remembers him — a man who didn’t show much emotion when her mother passed away, a man who keeps asking her grandfather for money to finance a failed business venture. Like with Tolstoy’s great short story ‘Little Girls Wiser Than Men’, the two girls Sabitha and Edith — especially the latter — are depicted as wise beyond their years, initially.

But as we discover through the course of the story, bookish cleverness is no match for lived experiences and soon, it becomes clear that neither Edith nor Sabitha can predict the chain reaction that their act of forgery will bring about. Eventually, Johanna and Ken marry, an act that leads to a mutual transformation for the down-on-luck duo. The schoolmarmish Johanna gets a new lease of life and a shot at love while the beleaguered Ken finally cleans up his act and accepts this second chance at domesticity.

My favourite passage from the story happens towards the end, when Edith is thinking about her school lessons — they are important to her as a means of escaping her blue-collar life, which is unbearably dull to a clever girl. But she also acknowledges that the events with Johanna and Ken have humbled her — as that last line about their new son Omar shows.

“And in a way, it seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be connected with her present self — let alone with the real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her. It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her — it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?”

A writer’s writer

You can see a broadly similar method at play in many of Munro’s other famous stories as well —the dynamic between two girls at summer camp in ‘Child’s Play’, the class issues between the young female protagonists of ‘Fathers’, the central romantic arc between an ex-soldier and his new landlady in ‘Train’ and so on. In each of these stories, happenstance plays an important role, but not a vital one — coincidence can only take you to the doorstep of self-actualization, Munro seems to suggest. Life can take you by the hand and lead you to the threshold but you have to take the final steps yourself.

This deliberate, considered, constant-revision method followed by Munro — she was an incorrigible reviser of her own previous work — made her a bit of a writer’s writer, especially beloved among her peers. Her compatriot Margaret Atwood called her the closest thing we have to the Russian masters today, and one is inclined to agree. This comparison also makes sense when you consider Munro’s own thoughts about her craft. In the introduction to the career anthology Selected Stories (1996), she deconstructs her own writing, emphasizing the sense of discovery that a great short story brings about in the reader. If a novel was all about depicting and in some ways replicating the passage of time, a short story centred on the moment of catharsis, the thrill of the unexpected.

“A story is not like a road to follow (…) it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time.”

With Munro’s passing the world has lost one of its true literary titans. May her words continue to enthrall generations of readers — and writers.