The Long Story Short of Alice Munro
An appreciation of the short story and one of its most beloved and lauded practitioners
This story is part of the memorial for Alice Munro created by Quiet Reading with Tara Penry
When I heard that Alice Munro had died, I drove down to the library to beat the rush. There were five volumes of her work on the shelf below Morrison, Toni, and a hand span away from Murdoch, Iris.
I was greedy and grabbed two of the Munro, Alice short story collections.
Finding Alice
I am a recent devotee of Alice’s writing although I was familiar with her name. Over more than 40 years, she published 14 short story collections and a novel, consistently winning awards that included the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.
When Alice died at the age of 92, she hadn’t published any new work since 2012. She had been in declining health for many years and the churn of the literary scene had plowed under her canon beneath a crop of fresh titles.
As an aspiring fiction writer, it was a joy to discover the buried treasure of stories like The Bear Came Over the Mountain (1999) and Wenlock Edge (2005).
I had (have?) dreams of writing a novel but, with a huge amount to learn about craft, my strategy has been to start small; character sketches, 100-word essays, micro-fiction up to 2000 words.
I searched for contemporary short story authors to be my schoolhouse and quickly found Alice Munro; the golden ivy-crowned head of the form.
I was in love from the first paragraph.
Feeling at home
Critics often write that Alice encompasses as much in a short story as a novel might hope to deliver. She is also able to span decades in a single storyline without losing either depth or intimacy.
Most of Alice’s stories are set in rural Ontario where she was born, and raised her own family. When asked in an interview about the settings for her stories, she said:
“I am at home with the brick houses, the falling down barns, the trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire. I speak the language.”
I marvel at her ability to convey a strong sense of time and place in a few simple lines. She sets simple details next to each other with no coy frills of language — the reader is met with farmhouse hospitality and arrives at the story, unruffled.
Genius of heart
Alice’s autobiography is written in the questions and observations that weave through her fiction. It is the timeless story of being a woman enmeshed in expectations, both willingly and not, and her contradictory desires to have purpose and to be free.
I have spent most of my life in isolated communities and small towns, though not in Canada, yet the commonalities that draw me to Alice’s work are experiences that happen wherever people live. From growing up and college life, to the loss of a child and divorce, Alice writes the story of what it is to be a girl, a woman; it’s my story.
Extraordinary things happen in her stories; brutal murder, heroic valor, bizarre coincidences — not because a sensational plot point is needed but because that’s how life is.
It’s how people are and Alice draws on a profound understanding of the human condition that makes her characters instantly recognizable. Good people fall into petty meanness, insecurity grows into lust for control, a sense of responsibility is twisted by madness.
I love how Alice captures the nuances of naivety and immaturity, so similar yet not the same.
And her male characters are written with the same care for the roles and expectations foisted on them by our society — there is no contempt or resentment masquerading as feminism.
Every naked ape that is presented for examination is a person first and foremost, and deserving of respect as such.
Compassionate conspiracy
Reading Alice Munro feels less like being tricked into a suspension of disbelief than being invited into a conspiracy of compassion. I can’t binge-read these stories, they live with me long after the telling ends and the characters take up too much space.
The character I most enjoy getting to know — the central character in many of the stories, is Alice herself. She’s warm yet reticent, with a sharp eye and a wry sense of humor.
In Fiction (2009), Alice skewers herself through a thin disguise with themes of authority and authorship, of ego and betrayal, all without a hint of self-pity.
The story is the writer’s examination of herself as the chief protagonist in her own affairs, as a wife and writer; and in someone else’s story as they choose to tell it.
All of the characters are Alice and, towards the end of the story, the older version reads the words of the younger self, a short story author:
“Love. She was glad of it. It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness — however temporary, however flimsy — of one person could come out of the greatest unhappiness of another.”
“Why yes”, [the older woman] thinks. “Yes.”
The Future of the Short Story
Is the short story dead?
Short stories have fallen out of favor in the literary world over the last 100 years or so, except as a stepping stone towards the greater achievement of producing a novel.
Short stories, once a fixture in all sorts of publications have become the specialty of literary magazines, with fewer opportunities for new writers to be published. And, unless the author is already famous, book sales for short story anthologies tend to do poorly.
The readership of short stories has declined overall, with readers seemingly reluctant to invest time and energy in orienting themselves to a story unless it’s the length of a novel. In this age of shrinking attention spans, that seems cruelly ironic.
Alice Munro’s extraordinary ability to accomplish the scope of a respectable novel in 9,000 to 12,000 words should be well suited to this moment.
Alice published only one novel, though, as Ben Dolnick wrote for the New York Times earlier this year:
Lives of Girls and Women (1971) bills itself as a novel, but it’s not, not really. It’s a collection of linked short stories, all to do with the Ontario childhood of a girl named Del (who happens to closely resemble Munro). […]
The way you know it’s not a novel is that you can read its “chapters” out of order, or entirely alone, and they work just fine.
Writers of fan fiction do something similar with stories for their readers, who arrive already oriented to the genre, premise, and central characters.
Younger generations are used to bingeing media online. Gen Zers are more savvy than anyone about the value of their eyeballs and they are increasingly choosy about where they spend their attention.
Perhaps more literary writers will explore different episodic formats for their storytelling. And perhaps the literary world will do more to help short stories and their authors flourish.
I hope so, if only because somewhere, down a long country road or in an urban tower block, it’s likely that there are other writers like Alice Munro.
Writers who don’t think they have the time or skills to write a novel; writers with a keen eye for what makes us human and an ear for a good story that can be read in one sitting yet continue to ring true for years afterward.
This essay is adapted from an earlier version published by Beth Riungu on Medium.