Review by New York Times Review
FOR THE PROTAGONISTS of Alice Munro's stories - mostly women, usually Canadian, never quite content - it can be tough to get from one place to another, from where they are to where they'd rather be. There are no direct flights, no express buses or trains in the world her characters move through: They always have to change somewhere. The narrator of "Home," one of the two dozen stories culled here from collections published in the last two decades, has to take three buses to visit her aging father and annoying stepmother and to learn a small thing about herself. Others in "Family Furnishings" have longer, harder journeys, with more ambiguous rewards: a new country, an uncomfortable truth, a difficult love. Some of Munro's pilgrims, like the unhappy wife in "Runaway," go part of the way and then turn back. But most just keep going: looking at the passing world, drifting in and out of the strange kind of contemplation travel can induce, until they've reached their destination. And that's the sort of state these stories put their readers in, too, a neither-here-nor-there reverie in which people and landscapes zip by quickly and yet with an unusual clarity, reminding you of things you thought you'd forgotten or making you wonder how other people, in other places, live their lives. A few of Munro's tales, like "Home," "Dear Life" and the radiant "Working for a Living," are told in the first person and feel autobiographical, but more typically her stories seem to come from the pure curiosity of looking out the window of the bus. What's it like to be that person, sitting on that bench? How does it feel to go home to that house every night? In the title story - one of the apparently autobiographical ones - the young woman who narrates wants to be a writer, and at the end of her reminiscence sits in a drugstore drinking coffee ("Such happiness, to be alone") and begins to think "of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories." Briefly, she rhapsodizes: "The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation." Finally, she makes a declaration: "This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be." That is, of course, the life Alice Munro wound up having, a life of grabbing stories out of the air. Jane Smiley, in an excellent foreword to this collection, calculates that Munro has performed that difficult act 140 times in her career (one novel, 139 short stories) and is appropriately awe-struck. Awe, mixed with a little sadness, is perhaps the inevitable response to this hefty volume, which, coming on the heels of Munro's Nobel Prize and her announcement that she was retiring from writing, gives "Family Furnishings" an air of finality, a sense that she, and her readers, have arrived at last at a destination. We're looking back, with her, at where we've been. Naming this collection for a story about a writer's beginnings also contributes to the aura of retrospection that hangs over the book. Fortunately, there's nothing sentimental about Munro's work, even when she's describing her younger self's love of the storyteller's art. The story "Family Furnishings," the raptures of its ending notwithstanding, is about discovering the remoteness - the coldness - necessary to write fiction. Here and elsewhere, Munro treats her characters' ability to distance themselves emotionally from the circumstances of their lives with a strange, and clearly genuine, sort of respect. The people she seems to feel the strongest affinity for are, like her (and like all good writers), watchers. The taciturn housekeeper Johanna of "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," who holds her romantic feelings hilariously close to the vest, is one of those; and so is Jackson, the enigmatic hero of the late story "Train" (and one of Munro's rare male protagonists), a drifter who moves in and out of other people's lives, always ready to hop a train to someplace else. There are many more like them in Munro's stories, keeping their own counsel and observing - and being observed, by a writer who knows a thing or two about silence, exile and cunning. But Munro also does justice to people who don't really notice much and have the mysterious gift of being completely, unreflectively who they are, like Marian, the mulish wife of an Alzheimer's patient in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," and Irlma, the irritating stepmother of "Home," brisk and frighteningly definite in her opinions. In both cases, the women's narrow certainties seem horrifying, and Munro's superb ear for dialogue makes matters worse: She renders their awkward speech with pitiless precision. (Irlma, for example: "The cake's even a mix, I'm shamed to tell you. Next thing you know it'll be boughten.") In the end, though, the stories honor the women's uncomplicated strength, their ability to keep track of what's important. They're harder to love than the quiet watchers, but Munro makes sure we love them all the same. Even if you've read the stories in "Family Furnishings" before, they still spring surprises, large and small. The construction of a tale like "The Love of a Good Woman," which may have felt odd on first reading, now seems exactly right, unimaginable otherwise. Because Munro's people often act unpredictably - they wind up doing things they hadn't known they were going to do, and startle themselves - the stories, even on repeated readings, retain their original suspense, their sense that anything can happen. You may realize that you'd forgotten how various Munro's fiction is, how many different kinds of stories she has grabbed out of the air over the years. There are eccentric love stories like "Hateship, Friendship" and "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"; tales in which almost nothing happens, like "Wood"; others in which terrible crimes are committed, as in "Dimensions" and "Child's Play," or threatened, as in "Runaway"; and quick, elliptical historical fictions, like "The View From Castle Rock," about her family's passage to the New World, and "Too Much Happiness," about the real-life Russian mathematician and writer Sophia Kovalevsky. As Smiley points out, in the past two decades Munro "has gotten more experimental rather than less." In a single short work, her adventurousness is sometimes disguised by the lucidity and serenity of her prose, but if you read the stories in "Family Furnishings" one after the other, you can't miss it. Munro may have arrived at the end of her career, but her stories keep changing, as works of art tend to do. "The town, unlike the house," Munro writes in "Home," "stays very much the same - nobody is renovating or changing it." She adds: "Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up." But, she says, "not for my father. He has lived here and nowhere else. He has not escaped things by such use." The sense of finality in this collection is, like so many powerful feelings, illusory. These stories were, the writer admits, her means of escape, and they have that quality still. They remain restless, unsettled. In "Family Furnishings," Alice Munro looks back, but as a fugitive does - to see if something's gaining on her. What's it like to be that person, sitting on the bench? How does it feel to return to that house?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 14, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The two dozen stories gathered here are drawn from Munro's collections that appeared over the past two decades, this blue-ribbon compilation now joining her previous Selected Stories (1996) in presenting arguably the best of the sterling fiction this personally and professionally unpretentious Canadian has contributed to the world. And that world rose up in unified celebration when Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature; as Munro was subsequently lauded far and wide, the epithet beloved showed its perfect suitability when applied to her. American novelist Jane Smiley provides a thoughtful, admiring foreword, which sets the stage for what follows, wise stories by a wise woman, in Smiley's view, which makes a fit mantra for Munro followers to chant. In reading these stories or rereading them, as will be the case for most of us what is refreshingly obvious is that Munro has retained all the distinctive characteristics and qualities that set her fiction apart from the outset, including her apparently effortless but actually word-perfect style, her use of family history to inform the contemporary domestic situations she so vividly employs in her stories, the quotidian nature of her characters and their plights (which, ultimately, gives her stories their wide appeal), and the purposeful elimination of nonessential detail to permit a novel's worth of substance to comfortably fit into a short story's confined space. What is new in recent stories is her more in-depth, autobiographical presentation, which adds further personal enrichment to her domestic dramas. The best example is the crown jewel of the compilation. The View from Castle Rock is a startlingly authentic and achingly heartfelt rendering of her ancestors' early-nineteenth-century emigration from Scotland to Canada, a 37-page testament to Munro's singular artistry. But fans will be pleased to see stories that have become favorites, including The Bear Came over the Mountain, Runaway, and The Love of a Good Woman. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With her Nobel win, public libraries' Munro collections are undoubtedly getting a heavy workout, and this volume makes a timely and practical substitution for worn-out copies.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Top-shelf collection by Canadian Nobelist Munro, perhaps the best writer of short stories in English today.Certainly few, if any, narrators are less trustworthy than Munro's; among many other things, she is the ascended master of quiet betrayals, withheld information and unforeseeable reversals of fortune. "We say of some things that they can't be forgiven," says the thoughtful narrator of "Dear Life," the closing story, "or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we dowe do it all the time." Yes, we do, but not without torment. Fiona, the protagonist of "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the stunning story that is the heart of Sarah Polley's great film Away From Her, cannot be blamed for causing the pain she does: Dementia has overtaken her, but even so, her husband can't help but wonder whether "she isn't putting on some kind of a charade." People put on acts, of course, all the time, and Munro seems to be telling us (as at the very opening of the sly story "The Eye") that we bamboozle each other from the moment we can understand languageand not necessarily for any malicious reasons. Munro packs plenty of compact but lethal punches, many of them hidden in seemingly gentle words: "I have not kept up with Charlene. I don't even remember how we said good-bye." Well, yes, she does, because "[y]ou expected things to end," and all that catches up to the chief player in "Child's Play" when she's called upon to say goodbye again. As is true of so many of Munro's tales, taken straight from the pages of quotidian life, its end is heartbreaking, tragic, not a little mysteriousand entirely unexpected. In fact, all that can be expected from these economical, expertly told stories is that they're near peerless, modern literary fiction at its very best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
