Alice Munro’s 11th book, Runaway, is the subject of the second in a series of five reviews of short fiction collections.
Runaway is heavy with accolades: it won The Giller Prize, was a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year, and made the shortlist for the Governor General’s Award. For so long a Canadian treasure, it seems that Alice Munro is at last getting the international recognition she so deserves.
Munro’s spare, undecorated writing has always resonated with me: stories of girls becoming women and women breaking free and buckling under, unfinished human beings finding a way to nurture their own private hopes — how similar we all are! — whilst conforming to expectation and regulation, as so many of us must. Her prose is meticulous, her characters unsettlingly real and achingly flawed.
Runaway succeeds both as a collection of individual stories and as a whole, coherent unit — something I think very few short story collections manage to do. The first, titular, story begins square in Munro territory as the cautious relationship between two women, one a farmhand, the other the owner of the farm, evolves into something more significant when the younger enlists the older’s help to run away. Yet the inclusion of mysticism transforms the story into something bigger, and it left me wondering whether the author was exploring new creative ground (and if so would she please continue doing so).
The collection also contains a literary triptych, a novella in three parts, again on the themes of escape, loss and acceptance of what is. ‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’ chart Juliet’s transition from girlhood to womanhood, donning and then losing the comfortably self-effacing mantles of wife and mother, unable to the end to lose herself. The take-home, as a reader, is a musing on what it means to really know yourself, the only companion you’re sure to have the whole way through.
‘Passion’, the heartbreaking ‘Tricks’ and ‘Powers’ round out the collection, each a quiet revelation on different phases of the journey from girl to woman. Wrong decisions and their unending aftermath, the weight of hope, the sting of jealousy, the dark realness of experience after a lifetime of anticipation — these are the connected moments that make us who we are:
She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now.
Sentimentality tends to take away from short fiction — I think the form is best suited to observation, glance-type snippets of other lives, told in a way that invites the reader to form his or her own attachments. As much as she embraces weighty subject matter, Munro never tells her reader how to feel. Her characters are as they are, not as she wants us to see them. Rather than influencing how her reader should relate to her work, Munro offers her observations as just that — unpolished glimpses into the lives and thoughts and wants of people like you and me.
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