Too Much Happiness

The thing about Alice Munro is, she makes it seem so EASY. Of course, it's never easy translating the core of human emotions with a few deft strokes. Or to capture universal truisms in a couple of beautiful words. Unless, of course, you're Alice Munro! Take, for example, the haunting story "Child's Play", about two young girls and a special needs child. Munro writes: "Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable." In a brief sentence, she dispels the notion of childhood innocence and flexibility and reveals children for what they are: afraid of what is strange. Or take a quote from the signature story, Too Much Happiness: "When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out, she carries everything that happened in the room along with her." Does this writer understand the human condition or WHAT? Munro draws her readers deftly into a sort of alternative world, where the people ring true, the situations, even when bizarre, seem real, and the recognitions are surprisingly of oneself. There is much pain in these stories; in Dimensions, a woman who must soldier on after her husband murders her three children. In Wenlock Edge -- in my mind, one of the best in the collection -- a college student feels compelled to read to a benefactor stark naked, and endure a humiliation that will likely always affect the way she views literature and learning. In Deep-Holes, a mother must cope with a flipped-out adult son who condemns her for not being "useful in life." And in Face, a boy with a deformed face connects and separates with a childhood friend who performs self-mutilation. The final, title story focuses on a real-life 19th century Russian mathematician and novelist and reveals another aspect of humanity entirely. The writing is not flashy, not post-modern, and not self-conscious; just powerful, ambitious, and pitch-perfect from a writer who is correctly touted as one of the top writers working today. At the end of the book, "too much" seemed not enough at all; I await her next collection.

I could not put this book down. I have yet to read a contemporary writer who writes with such powerful insight on the human experience as Munro. She is a literary giant, to say the least. A very moving collection.

I've given the collection 5 stars because the stories are still masterful: never afraid to explore what they are, unafraid of time, bold, brilliant, etc. However, I do not think this is her best at all. Someone else brought up "Hateship..." and I agree--that collection was far better, as were some earlier ones. Why? How to quantify? I think these stories sometimes suffer from not enough complexity, or an easy way out, a simpler narrative line, not as much depth. Exceptions, in my opinion, were Child's Play (I think the best story in the collection), Deep Holes (also very well done)and the first story (I'm forgetting the title, the one about the woman with the murdered children--although I have to say that this couple has been done before, and better: the story she wrote some time ago, opening with a woman vandalizing a house with her timid boyfriend, and then peeling back the layers and discovering that as a child she'd been molested by the father, who skins animals; hope you know which one I mean. That story was much more complex, dared more, and covered more, than the opening story in this collection, and yet the characters of both abusive men as well as the marriage are very similar.) Still those three stories were quite good. THe other ones, in my opinion, are just less complex and dare much less than her earlier stories. Her final story, I thought, was terrible. I really disliked it. I mean, she did dare by writing about a Russian couple from a century ago in Europe--but, having Russian ancestry myself and remembering my own grandmother, I felt this one was very off, not real at all. The characters were almost caricatures, derivative, and the story was really slow and not very deep. So that last story sort of ruined the collection for me as usually the big, long story is her masterwork, as it has been in several other of her collections. However, she is Munro, and her stuff is still extremely well done and highly worth reading. Others may disagree with me about their favorite stories, and that's great. To those who complain about 'depressing,' I have no response. Some things are depressing, that's life. To ignore a story because it's unpleasant is to ignore life and art. Watch Disney then.

The characters in Alice Munro's newest book, some anyway, are more extreme than I've been used to encountering in her earlier books. There are two triple-murderers, a woman whose childhood friend helped her kill another girl, a beloved son who chooses to be a derelict, the male narrator (rare for Alice) whose port-wine birthmark thwarts his whole life, and there are a statistiacally improbable number of "specials", people with disabilities of intelligence. The dysfunctional relationships, Munro's perennial subject, are more extreme, or perhaps just more quirky, than in previous portrayals. Munro's stories have always stayed close to home - southern Ontario - and close to plain folk, to herself, her family, her ordinary `others'. That's been the great strength of her work, really -- her honesty, her close-to-bone reality. Now in her seventies, in this book and in her 2006 "The View from Castle Rock", Munro seems to be stretching her range both in time and space, writing about emigrants of the previous generation, about people who weren't and couldn't have been neighbors ... and in the title story of this collection, "Too Much Happiness", she's written a long story/novella about a Russian woman mathematical prodigy of the 19th Century. It's easy to understand why she wants to stretch, to establish her claim to some universality and some ability to get beyond her own identity as a subject. No one who has read all of her previous work, as I have, could deny that she has "written the same story again and again." She has. Or rather, she has written her several stories again and again, like Leitmotives, in her eleven books. That is NOT, believe me, a weakness in her art. It's been her genius to be able to re-examine those stories - those experiences - from the perspectives of different ages-stages of her `unfinished' life. Each retelling has expanded the story, added rings to the tree trunk of memory. Trees, wood, and wood-working... it occurs to me that `wood' has been as much a character in Munro's narrative cast as any human, and in this collection, one story is titled "Wood." `Cancer' has also intervened often enough, and in some of Munro's finest stories, to be considered a stock character. If anyone supposes that Munro hasn't written enough about the Great Themes, let me ask you: what theme is greater than one's own death? Or than `age'? Munro has always written eloquently about the elderly, and about children. That's been another of her literary accomplishments. In this collection, however, `age' takes a different role. Here's the first sentence of the story Some Women: "I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am." Wow! Me too, Alice! I'm ten years behind you, 68 to your 78, but I'm keeping pace like a kid brother, edging relatively closer every year. Munro writes about the strangeness of living memories of dead-and-vanished worlds, of life-styles that now seem incomprehensibly extinct, of conversations recorded in her living conscious mind th

It is an honor to review 'Too Much Happiness' by Alice Munro, who I consider the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language. Ms. Munro is Canadian and lives in Clinton, Ontario. During her writing career she has garnered many awards including the Lannan Literary Award, the United States National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, as well as many other literary publications. I consider her an icon. With each book of hers that I have read (and I have read them all!) I think that she has reached her zenith. Yet, with each new publication, I find her newest work better than her previous publications. Her work is glorious. At the rate she's going now, her zenith may be light years away. I find the metaphor of looking into a tide pool an apt one for describing the stories of Ms. Munro. A tide pool is a microcosm of the ocean, yet it has a certain stasis and life of its own. It is a living organism, relating to the macrocosm of life in many ways. The tide pool contains living species of fish, reptiles and crustaceans, all delineated by their own life cycle which can change with the tides or with the events of weather. Ms. Munro's stories are like this. She will take a small microcosm of life and show how it has enduring and lifelong effects - effects which may be immediately observable or which may not be obvious for decades. 'Too Much Happiness' is a collection of ten short stories, each wonderful in their own right and each one as rich and nuanced as a novel. Many of them deal with similar themes - paradox, movement through time, repercussions of impulse, regret, acts of horror and relationships. 'Dimensions', the first story in the collection is about a damaged woman whose three children are murdered. She goes through life feeling empty through she talks to a social worker regularly. She is driven to visit and re-visit her ex-husband in jail. At one point he writes her a diatribe about his revelations that their children are now in another dimension. On her way to visit him one evening on the bus, she witnesses a car accident and attempts CPR on the victim. Through the CPR, she can feel life return to the young man who is near death's door. By the third story in this collection, 'Wenlock Edge', specific themes begin to emerge - Who are we? Do we change in relationships? Of what are we capable under certain situations? Do these situations have particular reasons or are they random events related to our current environments? The story begins with a a young woman who has regular visits from her aunt and bachelor uncle when she is a child. Her aunt dies. The young woman continues school in the city and has a weekly ritual dinner with her uncle. She also has a small circle of acquaintances. Solely by chance, she ends up with a part-time roommate with a `history'. This roommate