Alice Munro Slaps, Actually

Contra Lorentzen

What is the point of genius? In art, genius allows you to be even a little bit good. Art is very hard to be even a little bit good at, and so it takes a unique set of circumstances to produce a human who is able to make art that is useful to us. 

What do we need art for? We want someone to notice we are in pain. We want someone to notice we feel ashamed, even if we are not able to tell them. We want someone to tell us they know what we have lost, and why, and where. We want someone to understand us.

But for someone to understand you, they have to know you, care for you, pay you attention.

For Canadians, this does not happen often. This is because Canada is small. A small market does not often sustain the conditions for great art. Talented people often cut and run to larger markets. ‘Brain drain’, now heard more often in STEM contexts, is just as real among artists. The result is that Canadian existence remains perpetually illegible to non-Canadians, and worse, illegible to Canadians. This means that Canadians never really understand ourselves; we are always looking for our reflection in pictures that do not depict us. 

And so it is fortunate when a world-class talent stays within the small place she’s from, training her prodigious eye on the humble people she grew up among, and understands, and loves.

*

I first encountered Alice Munro’s fiction in 1997, when I was fourteen, in rural Ontario, in the pages of an O. Henry Prize Stories collection, which I read at the dining table under our big picture windows that by day looked out onto rolling fields of cows and tall wheatish grass but at night were black and reflected back at us the scenes of our life as we moved from the couch to the kitchen to the table where we ate spaghetti and my parents drank wine and I fingered the wax pooling at the bottom of the table’s sputtering candle I had drawn close to me for this purpose. Munro’s story “The Love of a Good Woman,” about a home-care nurse in rural Ontario learning of a patient’s involvement in her husband’s death, was originally published in the New Yorker—from my perspective in the fields, the very voice of empire—and was collected in the 1997 O. Henrys. Munro also had a story in the 1998 O. Henrys, and in 1999’s, 2001’s, and 2002’s, though I had stopped reading the collections by then because I was at university and had been turned on to the more masculine, American intensities of J. D. Salinger and Henry Miller.

Aside from Stephen King’s novels, the O. Henry collections were the first ‘adult’ books I ever read, and as a teenage boy I’m sure I barely understood the first layer of Munro’s spectacularly nuanced portraits of internal adult tension. As I got older I appreciated them more—it occurring to me that, like Tolstoy’s, her stories feel not so much like someone writing about life as life writing itself—but I’m not sure I ever got as much out of them as when I was fourteen and saw through her stories that what was happening to me and my family at the dining table on quiet winter evenings was the same thing happening to people in books and on TV—the same thing people in every part of the world and throughout history have called life.

On some level, though, after I moved to Toronto at the age of eighteen, I didn’t quite take Munro seriously as someone who could speak to my young cool life, until, when I was twenty-four, I read “Mischief,” where the characters have a threesome after a party in Toronto. Okay Alice, I thought. I owe you an apology. I was not familiar with your game.

So when Munro died on Monday and I was thinking about her, it was to “Mischief” that I returned, out of curiosity, wondering how I might read it now, at forty-one, living in Brooklyn with my partner.

*

But before I reread “Mischief,” I revisited Christian Lorentzen’s ‘takedown’ of her in the LRB, which was written in 2013, four months before Munro won the Nobel Prize, but which I read for the first time not long after I moved to New York in 2022. This was the era when I was rewatching Legally Blonde, and Eyes Wide Shut, and thinking to myself “Yes, America rocks… New York kicks ass… and so do I.” Reading Lorentzen then, secure within the empire, I felt a thrill at being, for the first time, on the same side as the bully. After a lifetime of insults to weak, polite Canada, I was on the side of The World’s Supercop, and didn’t have to be defensive about Lorentzen’s denigrations of Munro’s hickishness, which of course is exactly my own hickishness. Yes, I thought. She is always talking about these sad little nobody people! Ha ha! Why bother! Why not write about the big, important people in New York City! And their cocaines, and their fucking!

When I revisited Lorentzen’s piece this week, however, two things caught my eye.

The first was his sneer at her for “not really liking Faulkner,” using this quote as an apparently self-evident indictment of her taste. But this sneer is an indictment of Lorentzen. Because Munro was just being polite; Munro is of course leagues above Faulkner. Faulkner could pick a theme but if he ever had an insight he did not manage to express it; he’s long benefitted from the provincial American jingoism that critically inflates its hometown boys. Munro is so good that the question is more like: is Munro better than Michelangelo. The beauty and the perfection of her stories is more on the level of La Pietà than other “short fiction.” Is she a little boring sometimes? Sure. But you don’t visit La Pietà when you’re in the mood to party. Munro is the best short story writer to ever live, and there probably won’t be a better one. She is definitely the best Canadian writer ever. Personally, I think she’s more important than a thousand La Pietàs. Jesus Christ never knew what Tim Hortons signified, but Alice Munro did.

*

The second thing that caught my eye in Lorentzen was when he was listing all the autobiographical similarities Munro shared with her authorial stand-in, Rose, and referred to Western as a “provincial university.” Hold on, I thought, remembering some long-ago ranking I’d internalized as an Ontario high school student—Western is a good school! I looked it up: “tenth best university in Canada,” according to their website, and “top 1% in the world.”

I also had to acknowledge that, from the point of view of the metropole, Western is a “provincial university. But I was irked.

That irkedness was still with me as I started to reread “Mischief,” when, early on, I came across this passage:

These were the ideas of most well-educated, thoughtful, even unconventional or politically radical young women of the time. One of the reasons Rose did not share them was that she had not been well educated. Jocelyn said to her, much later in their friendship, that one of the reasons she found it so interesting to talk to Rose, from the start, was that Rose had ideas but was uneducated. Rose was surprised at this, and mentioned the college she had attended in Western Ontario. Then she saw by an embarrassed withdrawal or regret, a sudden lack of frankness in Jocelyn’s face—very unusual with her—that that was exactly what Jocelyn had meant.

Munro is actually replicating here exactly the experience I’d just had reading Lorentzen: hickish, backwater Rose thought her school was good—or at least not so insignificant that it didn’t provide an education!—but her friend Jocelyn, who grew up in Massachusetts and went to Wellesley, doesn’t even consider it the same kind of thing as Wellesley.

Of course, neither of these stances—that Western is a top-10 Canadian university, and that it’s “provincial”—are more correct. The difference is scale. From the distance of Lorentzen’s view from the center of the world, a Canadian life can’t help but be seen as flat and featureless. Up close, in Munro’s telling, we’re able to see every fold and feature, the attention paid to the details of our lives a gift so few others have ever given.

One more thing: even within the one tiny passage I quoted above, Munro gives us something else, too: the “well-educated” and “thoughtful” idea of Rose’s Wellesley-educated friend is that a woman couldn’t possibly be a great artist, and Munro proceeds to nimbly and nonjudgmentally deconstruct why the rich American ‘radical’ had views so much more backwards and self-defeating than the simple country Canadian. This is such a huge slap to American, and indeed urban, condescension, and it’s not even close to the point of the story; Munro, as she pushes massively and implacably through time like a glacier, is casually, gently destroying those who would dismiss hickish her by simply being better than them—and everyone.