October 12, 2013
(left, Alice Munroe.)
If people like Henry Kissinger and Barrack Obama can win the Nobel Peace Prize,
it shouldn’t shock us that a depressive who depicts middle class Canadian life
as tawdry and banal should be honored with the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.
This is not a criticism of Alice Munroe. It is a criticism of the Nobel Prize committee
for promoting a constricting and demeaning image of life, as opposed to one that is
universal, insightful and uplifting.
Christian Lorentzen describes what now passes for great literature.
The state of Art reflects the state of politics.
“Reading ten of her collections in a row has induced in me not a glow of admiration but a state of mental torpor that spread into the rest of my life. I became sad, like her characters, and like them I got sadder. I grew attuned to the ways life is shabby or grubby…”
(London Review of Books, June 2013)
(Edited/abridged by henrymakow.com)
There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings…She writes about and redeems ordinary life, ordinary people – ‘people people people’, as Jonathan Franzen puts it.
Ordinary people turn out to live in a rural corner of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort…
Reading ten of her collections in a row has induced in me not a glow of admiration but a state of mental torpor that spread into the rest of my life. I became sad, like her characters, and like them I got sadder. I grew attuned to the ways life is shabby or grubby, words that come up all the time in her stories, as well as to people’s residential and familial histories, details she never leaves out. How many rooms are in the house, and what sort of furniture and who used to own it and what is everybody wearing? To ask these questions is to live your life like a work of realism. I saw everyone heading towards cancer, or a case of dementia that would rob them of the memories of the little adulteries they’d probably committed and must have spent their whole lives thinking about.
—-
The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo & Rose (1978) follows a woman, Rose, whose life trajectory bears similarities to Munro’s: a hardscrabble childhood in Ontario; devotion to schoolwork and high social anxiety at school; a scholarship to a provincial university; a romance there that leads to an early marriage, decampment to the suburbs of Vancouver, and immediate motherhood; a middle-class existence that renders the husband stiff, even a bit right-wing; a yearning for a more bohemian milieu; adultery of an unsatisfying sort with an artsy fellow; rupture, divorce, squabbles over child custody; temporary self-imposed exile to some snowbound outpost in the middle of Canada where the singles scene isn’t exactly hopping and desperate loneliness ensues; a return to Ontario, more bad love affairs, and the caretaking of an ageing parent; a lucky break that leads to an exceptional career and something like fame. There are differences between Munro and Rose: Rose’s mother died in her infancy and Flo is her stepmother and, it’s hinted, a lower-class person than either Rose’s birth mother or Munro’s real mother, a teacher who put on airs that alienated both her in-laws and her own family; Rose becomes, in the end, an actress on stage and television, not a distinguished author.
‘Mischief’ is the adultery story in The Beggar Maid: in the maternity ward Rose, whose husband, a former graduate student in history, is now running his family’s department store, befriends a woman called Jocelyn who is connected to the university scene in Vancouver. One of their jokes involves starting sentences with the phrase ‘I’m no prude but …’
Clifford, Jocelyn’s husband and a musician, kisses Rose at a party, and they start an affair that involves snogging in cafés and a logistically awkward rendezvous in a town where Clifford is playing in a concert. He gets cold feet and the affair is never consummated.
(In wake of Nobel Prize, unwary people stock up on Munroe)
Years later, Rose is divorced and living in rural Ontario, and Jocelyn and Clifford have moved to Toronto. They’re all in their forties and their children have grown up. Jocelyn and Clifford invite Rose over for occasional long nights of drinking; they also have it out in front of her about their marital dissatisfactions. One night after a party:
‘What can we do?’ said Rose. ‘We shouldn’t drink anymore.’
‘We could make love,’ Clifford said.
Jocelyn and Rose said, ‘Really?’ at exactly the same time. Then they linked their little fingers and said, ‘Smoke goes up the chimney.’
Following which, Clifford removed their clothes. They didn’t shiver, it was warm in front of the fire. Clifford kept switching his attention nicely from one to the other. He got out of his own clothes as well. Rose felt curious, disbelieving, hardly willing, slightly aroused and, at some level she was too sluggish to reach for, appalled and sad. Though Clifford paid preliminary homage to them both, she was the one he finally made love to, rather quickly on the nubbly hooked rug.
Poor Rose! For the rest of the book her assignations and affairs are either botched by snowstorms or cut short because the man dies of cancer without calling her back. She sees her ex-husband in an airport and he looks shriveled and full of hatred for her. ‘At some level’, sex will always appall her: she can’t help it – it’s her prudish upbringing.
