I knew I’d probably love Alice Munro’s, Dear Life. Her Selected Stories is one of my favorite to reread, one of my favorite gifts to give. But the newer book has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years. I don’t know why I hesitate to start short story collections. It seems they would involve less commitment, not more. But I see short works as requiring more attention—the way a poem requires even more still—and I think I have to be in the right frame of mind. I don’t trust a short story to pull me in the way a good novel does.
But I forgot how adept Alice Munro is at writing a sentence in such a way that you immediately drop in—not only to a story— into a particular character’s version of it. (You may have noticed that this blog will be more love letter than critique. Who has time to write about books they don’t like? And why?) Take this first line, “Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way.” Or this one, “‘It isn’t a good thing to have money concentrated all in one family, the way you do in a place like this,’ Mr. Carlton said.” And, one more, “At that time we were living beside a gravel pit.”
None of these use the trick that has turned into gospel in the magazine world—of making the first sentence so exciting or controversial that no one could possible stop reading. Instead her first sentences and all that follow are just so real that the world is already erected around you by the time you get to the end of the first paragraph. Reading Alice Munro is effortless.
Having read these stories in Dear Life, I am now aware that each of these sentences is the loaded gun in the Chekov quote we all learned about in fiction writing class, paraphrasing here: Remove all that is not essential to the story; if you introduce a gun in scene one, it must go off by act three. Only, Alice Munro did not have to tell me it was a gun to hold me. She reminds me that our attention is what makes life and people vivid and interesting. Thank you dear Alice.
Laura Stavoe