Runaway

In her last collection of short stories, Alice Munro investigates her typical emotional terrain: young girls defined and confined by Canadian small towns, marriages stripped bare of illusions of romance, women grappling with diminishing expectations of their lives. In few pages, Munro deftly reveals entire life spans in these eight stories, each revolving around an impulsive decision made that irrevocably alters the future. In the title story, "Runaway," a young horse trainer contemplates leaving her volatile marriage with the dubious assistance of an older woman. As with many Munro's stories, Nature plays an ominous role as a wild force unable to be tamed. Here, animal sacrifice is all that will quell one husband's rage. Three subsequent stories tracks choices made at the various stages of a woman's life--girl, mother, and crone. In "Chance," a young girl, Juliet, believes in her intellectual powers, but with sorrowful clarity she predicts its loss as she waits for the man she will soon marry: "The thing that was your brightest treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember." Fear, loneliness, and desire lead Juliet to the expected roles of wife and mother taming her individuality, waylaying and obscuring this "treasure." Only when her husband has died at sea and her daughter has severed communication after an escape to the wilderness, does Juliet regain her power by devoting her time to this unique gift. In the final work, "Powers," a vivacious small town girl and her neighbor, a fortune teller, reconcile the last years of their lives with lost chances at love, petty jealousies and cruelties, and the fragility of memory that adjusts to make the burdens of wrongheaded choices easier to bear. When this story ends, the mind too has gone wild as both women hover between knowing and not knowing what has become of those they love. The subtlety of this discomfort highlights the foreboding quality of all of Munro's work: "But deep in that moment some instability is waiting that Nancy is determined to ignore." This, just before a woman is lead gently to death. Each of these stories shows Munro at her "Runaway" best.

I have been learning to knit lately, and I'm still at the stage where each stitch is awkward and laborious. Watching my friend and teacher do it is quite different --- smooth and rhythmic, neither too much tension nor too little. I see that knitting is a mysterious architecture of wool and soul in which every loop and turn depends on every other, and with a single missed link the whole web can collapse. Reading the Canadian writer Alice Munro is similar to this. Her stories are woven with such craft that it seems almost as if she is describing something that really happened rather than inventing it. And the consequences of a lucky encounter or a fateful decision are still playing out years later. I must admit that I was intimidated by the prospect of reviewing Munro's latest collection, RUNAWAY, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2004 by the New York Times. She is probably my favorite living writer, and so unpretentious about what she does that the last thing I want is to describe her fiction in words fancier or more self-conscious (in one review, I found adumbrate, transformative, sustenance, and salvation) than the language she uses herself. I'm not alone in feeling perplexed. Jonathan Franzen, writing in the New York Times Book Review (November 14, 2004), was so reluctant to do an ordinary review of this extraordinary writer that instead he produced a (brilliant) list of "guesses at why [Munro's] excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame." And it's true: She is revered rather than celebrated --- no Pulitzer, no Nobel, not even a National Book Award (though she has won plenty of other prizes). Possibly (Franzen mentions this) it has to do with literary form: Short stories (Munro has written only one novel) have not been --- since the days of Chekhov (with whom she is regularly compared) and Saki, Katherine Mansfield and O'Henry --- as valued as much as novels. They're just not considered Big-Deal Lit. But I am procrastinating. Without giving away the often devastating twists and surprises of the plots of these eight stories (if literary fiction isn't supposed to be suspenseful, somebody forgot to tell Munro), this is what I'd say to somebody who has never read her (if you have, you probably already have your own copy of RUNAWAY). The first thing is the characters: I wouldn't say they are memorable in the sense that Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina are, but unlike either of those fictional ladies, they are endearingly ordinary: They don't swan around being melodramatic or heroic or incurably romantic. They are often smart, ardent girls, different from others at school, hungry for books and adventure and mystery --- like Grace in "Passion," one of my favorites in the collection. Here, Munro has crystallized the stuff of many a coming-of-age novel --- the innocence and fakery, the fear and the splendor --- into one powerful memory of a seductive family and a reckless ride. This is Munro's gift: She gathers us in with ordinary details, and a whole

I borrowed "Runaway" from the library. Now that I have read it, I have no choice but to go out and buy it. One read will never suffice. On the surface the stories seem straight forward, perhaps more so than Munro's other recent books and yet they are rich and complex. These are stories of great humanity. Outcomes are not predictable and the smallest of decisions can change a life forever. A word not said, a second glance not taken, have huge consequences. The characters and plots do not follow a predictable course as they would in a lesser fiction. Even the less sympathetic characters are drawn in shades of grey and we feel their pain and humanity. In the title story, a bully of a husband is a complex man who may or may not destroy, depending upon so little. We hold our breath in dread, hoping that those around him tread lightly. This collection of stories is simply breathtaking and deserves to be savoured again and again. .

Our book club recently picked this collection of short stories along with two others of the same ilk--a rare thing for us to do. While we thoroughly enjoyed David Eggers "How We Are Hungry" and Jackson McCrae's "The Children's Corner," we found Munro's collection to be the best thing we've come across in months. The sheer amount of territory covered in these sometimes no-so-short stories is remarkable and Munro's writing style should win over even the most irritable critic of this genre. Don't pass this collection by.

This was a wonderful book. I collect books of short stories because I like stories I can read in one sitting and this is up there with the top ten series of short stories I have encountered (right up there with Bedtime Stories for Women and The Best of Edgar Allen Poe). The writing is brilliant, the stories are interesting and intriguing. I think it is geared more towards women but men would enjoy it too.