OPINION:
FAMILY FURNISHINGS: SELECTED STORIES 1995-2014
By Alice Munro
Alfred A. Knopf, $30, 640 pages
Like one of those poor relatives or downtrodden governesses of Victorian fiction, the short story often seems anemic or slightly depressed. It is shuffled off into a corner, while its wealthy cousin the novel sits in the spotlit warmth, luxuriating in the depth and breadth that is its birthright. Lacking the novel’s richness, the short story offers a Jane Eyre-like intensity, which some readers may find uncongenial or bought at too great a literary price.
This is not the case with Alice Munro’s work. Since publishing her first story in 1950, when she was a student at Western Ontario University, she has since published 13 collections of stories. The earliest of these, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada’s highest accolade for writers, in 1968. Two later collections also won this award, and she has won numerous other literary honors, including the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and finally the Nobel Prize in 2013.
As this prize-winning record suggests, critics have always appreciated her work. They regularly compare it to Chekhov’s, especially because, like his, her stories usually have little in the way of plot, so they often end with the revealing insight rather than the disentangled incident. Then, too, her stories are remarkable for their evocation of places and the people who live there, for ambiguities, their ellipses, and their deftness. Her prose is lucid: ranging from delicacy to forthright attack, sometimes witty, ironic.
Time has always been important in Ms. Munro’s work, and if possible, is even more so in her latest collection, “Family Furnishings.” These stories, many of which have appeared in previous collections, are mostly set in earlier decades — usually the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s. Times were tougher then, and the rules of behavior were stricter — especially the rules about sexuality and the roles of men and women. Many stories focus on families in the small towns of Ontario or British Columbia, showing the compromises — sometimes tragedies — of family life in an era when much had to be kept quiet, marriage was typically for keeps, money did not grow on trees and decisions, once made, were final and had repercussions.
When she writes about rural communities like the small Ontario town where she grew up, Alice Munro wobbles neither into the marsh of pity for the hardships that people suffered, nor into sunny glorification of their lives. She is not at all nostalgic in the usual, rather negative sense: homesickness or pining for remembered places and people. Yet a more positive sense, nostalgia can describe a kind of remembering or connection to the past that nourishes the present, and in this sense it infuses much of this collection. The title story is an example. As a young teen in small-town Canada in the 1950s or so, the narrator is impressed by her father’s cousin Alfrida, a “career girl” who lives in the city and writes for the woman’s page of the newspaper. When she is older she lives closer to Alfrida, yet neglects her, only belatedly eventually condescending to visit. She finds Alfrida in a small apartment packed with huge outdated furniture. Why? To Alfrida, the giant wardrobes and sideboards and sofas are all sacrosanct: they are “family furnishings” that she has inherited.
Now it becomes clear that Alfrida’s history — never fully spoken about — has pushed her to the edges of the family. She therefore clings to anything and anyone connected to it, even while she has embraced the more independent life she has been able to lead.
Families are central to most of these stories. The parents are often mismatched. Too bad: no way to get out of it. People get sick, and someone takes care of them, sometimes as in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” in surprising ways. People yearn for each other as in Jakarta, where a mother and her daughter-in-law each privately keep alive the hope the son and husband last heard of many years ago in Jakarta can be discovered there alive and well. Children often break away, usually powered by education. That was a mixed blessing, “It was generally held to be more suspect for boys to be smart than for girls to be, though not particularly advantageous for one or the other. Girls could go on to become teachers, and that was all right — though quite often they became old maids — but for boys to continue with school meant they were sissies.”
Reading this volume is invigorating. Its stories attend to the ordinary lives that usually fall below the radar of attention by all except the neighbors watching that everyone stays on the straight and narrow. Yet Alice Munro’s description and investigation of such lives brings her characters beautifully and admirably to life, and reading what she has written, even when she’s tart or occasionally stern, makes our lives better too.
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.