Alice Munro, 82, has won the Nobel Prize for literature. She writes short stories in the Southern Ontario Gothic genre:
Like the Southern Gothic of American writers such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, Southern Ontario Gothic analyzes and critiques social conditions such as race, gender, religion and politics, but in a Southern Ontario context.[4]Southern Ontario Gothic is generally characterized by a stern realism set against the dour small-town Protestant morality stereotypical of the region, and often has underlying themes of moral hypocrisy. Actions and people that act against humanity, logic, and morality all are portrayed unfavourably, and one or more characters may be suffering from some form of mental illness. In a review of Alice Munro's Dear Life for Quill & Quire, literary critic James Grainger writes that "Violence, illness, and reputations ruined by a single indiscretion are accepted in Munro’s secretive, repressed communities as a kind of levelling mechanism, rough justice for those who dare to strive for something finer."[5]Although she set her sights on writing novels, time constraints led her to the short story:
Alice Munro never meant to be a short-story writer. She'd aimed for sprawling novels, born of years of work and planning. But when it came down to it, there just wasn't time. "A child's illness, relatives coming to stay, a pile-up of unavoidable household jobs, can swallow a work-in-progress as surely as a power failure used to destroy a piece of work in the computer," she once wrote in an introduction to one of her short-story collections. [2001]I don't recall ever reading a Munro story. At one time this genre would have been right up my alley, and maybe it still is. I love the Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O'Connor vibe, but at present, it portends to be angst-ily negative and unnecessarily moody. I fear this sort of writing may be a celebration of the general failure to reach maturity. I will check her out.
20 comments:
Good grief, someone attacking small town morality, repression, and hypocrisy.
How original.
I'm sure she's a great prose stylist, and I might read her, but the blurb really puts me off.
Hasn't every well known writer since Sinclair Lewis been attacking small town (or suburban) morality, repression, and hypocrisy?
Maybe, its more interesting with a Canadian accent.
Nobel Laureate.
The title you get is the same whether you invent the transister, or you discover the molecular structure of DNA, or you make up a bunch of stories, or you get elected the first sort-of black President of the United States.
And why the hell not?
Regarding the Nobel - the "Peace Prize" has always been a joke. The "Literature" prize no much better.
The problem with the Literature is they've wanted to reward people based on their country or ethnic group or the political impact of their work. "Political impact" meaning mostly pushing a liberal/left viewpoint.
Sometimes they get things right: T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Kipling, O'Neill.
They seem really poor at choosing English fiction writers: Galsworthy, Golding, Pinter, Lessing. A rather mediocre bunch.
I once read an anecdote about Munro that her father had helped put her through the university and at the end of it she insisted on paying him back to the last penny. I forget the sum but it took her something like fifteen years to pay the debt off. This is the world she writes about. There are many that still live up to that standard but many more consider it peculiar.
"And why the hell not?"
Now you're catching on.
Thx, rc, I haven't read any of the lesser authors you mentioned.
The Canada South shall rise again y'all hosers.
In Canada, I believe the South won. After all, they get to live farther away from the North Pole than the Canadian North. That simply HAS to be WINNING.
Southern Ontario Gothic? That puts me in mind of another Canadian author, Douglas Coupland, of Generation X fame. (Or infamy. Or whatever.) He had a bit in Generation X where he discusses sub-genre Hell in pop music.
Sheen's brain is half-fried. And he's only 48.
I've read some Flannery O'Connor. I admire her writing, but I've never been in a desperate hurry to pick up another book by her. Ms. Munro may have similar talent, but it doesn't sound that interesting. I'd like to see a novel that blows the lid off the venality and corruption in the Brazilian wax industry. That's inherently interesting subject matter for a talented writer to explore. South Ontario has been done to death.
For tight, exact, literary storytelling, Munro has been the best around for decades. I admire her ability. That doesn't mean I want to read more of her.
Her writing is basically permutations of the same story about a bright woman from a small town who encounters the strangeness, disconnection, and hypocrisy of the world, often in relation to men. The stories are usually unsettling -- quite angsty and moody, as Deborah put it. Little humor and no sympathetic male characters that I can recall.
Maybe it was bad luck on my part, but I kept running into abusive, delusional men in her stories which put me off reading any more. Her work fits the liberal, feminist narrative well.
Munro also resorts to the pseudo-epiphany, common in contemporary short stories, in which the writer injects an abrupt, surprising event at the end that blazes like a flare for several seconds throwing the story into sharp, almost hallucinatory, relief. The reader's brain goes tilt trying to process the information then comes away impressed that he or she experienced a Literary Event.
Try this New Yorker story, "Dimension," about a woman who visits her insane husband, who has murdered their children, at the mental institution and starts to believe his story that he is in communication with the children in another plane of existence.
Still Munro is a particularly fine writer. Prolific too. Munro would have been a better choice for the "No bad sentences" claim Althouse made for Fitzgerald.
Thank you, creeley, but what a dreary little story.
deborah: Wasn't it though?
I can see the similarities of Munro to Flannery 0'Connor, but overall I think they miss the mark.
First, O'Connor doesn't indulge quite so flourishy a literary style. Munro is like Dustin Hoffman in that one never forgets there is a very skillful artist at work.
Second, O'Connor has a rock-ribbed, moral vision informed by her unrepentant Catholicism. When she illuminates hyprocrisy, it is not that of a liberal looking down on small town, small-minded conservatives, but that of a Christian, with a capital-C, seeing the brokenness and unworthiness of the entire world under God -- herself included.
Third, O'Connor writes at an archetypal level that Munro never reaches, at least of those stories I've read. 0'Connor can change your life.
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
--Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Fourth, O'Connor is laugh-out-loud funny. The humor is as black and indelible as India ink.
For instance "Good Country People" is the story of a door-to-door Bible salesman trying to persuade a woman with a Ph.D in Philosophy. I won't spoil it. Things are not what they seem and the ending is shocking, right and hilarious.
It being a Flannery O'Connor story there is a moral, if you think about it, but she doesn't hit you over the head.
She died at 39 after fighting lupus for fourteen years.
Creeley, I was blown away when I read A good man. But, darn I don't remember that line...lol, perfect. But what an upsetting story. So realistic.
But yeah, as I was reading the story you linked, I was thinking she was no O'Connor. As far as Munro technique showing, I don't see much technique. But of course it's not fair to judge her on just one pitiful story. With short stories I guess you can go to the well to often?
Thanks for the recommendation on the O'Connor story, I will check it out.
"Dimension" was not the best showcase for her technique as her penchant for abusive, delusional males. Here's perhaps a better, more pleasant example from "The Bear Came Over the Mountain."
Fiona lived in her parents' house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic--a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife's strange tirades with an absentminded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn't in a sorority, and her mother's political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics--though she liked to play "The Four Insurgent Generals" on the phonograph, and sometimes also the "Internationale," very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her--she said he was a Visigoth--and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.
"Do you think it would be fun--" Fiona shouted. "Do you think it would be fun if we got married?"
He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
What wonderful detail!
Yes, very nice...I look forward to reading it...will get back to you...
Thanks, creeley, that was very nice. A lot better than the first.
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