The Mumpsimus

Today is Alice Munro's 90th birthday, and her singular, extraordinary career deserves great celebration.  Munro's first published story, "The Dimension of Shadow" , appeared (under her name at the time, Alice Laidlaw) in the April 1950 issue of the student literary magazine of the University of Western Ontario, Folio . According to Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker, she soon began sending her stories to Robert Weaver ( "the best friend the Canadian short story ever had" ), who ran a radio series on the CBC devoted to Canadian short stories; after rejecting a few, Weaver broadcast a reading of "The Strangers" on October 5, 1951. Weaver encouraged her to keep writing and to submit her work to literary journals. Her first professional appearance in print was with "A Basket of Strawberries" in Mayfair magazine's November 1953 issue. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades , was published in Canada in 1968, in the...

sunset at "Whistle" light house, Grand Manan, via Wikipedia At the heart of Alice Munro's story "Dulse" is a question the protagonist wonders about the writer Willa Cather: How did she live?  It is a question of vital importance to her, because she is at a moment of transition in her own life, and her future feels unclear.  Munro knows that the power of fiction is in posing questions, not answering them, and the wonder of this story is that it shows us that such questions as how to live may sometimes be the wrong ones — that how  is not nearly as important as to live . "Dulse" was first published in The New Yorker  in 1980, then revised for inclusion in Alice Munro's 1982 collection The Moons of Jupiter . The biggest change between the magazine and book versions is the point of view: in The New Yorker,  "Dulse" is a first-person story; in The Moons of Jupiter , it is third-person. The Moons of Jupiter  is an important collection in Munr...

I was pleased to read Kyle Minor's response to Christian Lorentzen's London Review of Books   hatchet job on Alice Munro, not because I think Munro is above criticism, but because Lorentzen's attempt at a take-down was pretty shallow. I read Lorentzen's piece and was merely moved to get snarky on Twitter , but Minor really digs into Lorentzen's claims. Much as I am in awe of Munro's best stories, I am also extremely wary of any discourse that builds up around a writer to make them seem impervious to criticism. This is perhaps Lorentzen's best claim — that Munro has been too much worshipped and too little evaluated. It does our understanding of her achievement no service to surround every sentence she writes with awe. Habitual praise is meaningless. The critical writing about Munro that I most appreciate is the type that really digs into what she's doing and its effects. I found Lorentzen's approach annoying not because he doesn't like Munro...

[update: for some reason I originally attributed the New Republic article discussed below to Ruth Gordon rather than Ruth Franklin.] I adore (adore, I tell you!) the stories of Alice Munro, as anybody who's looked at my bookshelves can attest, and I adore (adore, I tell you again!) the stories of Anton Chekhov, who actually takes up considerably more space on my shelves, but that's just because he wrote hundreds of stories, a bunch of plays, and all in Russian, which means, of course, that I absolutely must own every possible translation just to be able to compare. Anyway, I discovered ( via Scott ) that  Ruth Gordon Franklin over at The New Republic has claimed that Munro just writes about women and Chekhov didn't do this and why won't this Munro woman explain herself, eh?  Writing primarily about men is just fine, everybody does that, no need to comment, but writing primarily about women is ... "not necessarily a flaw".  It would be understandable if ...