The Barnes & Noble Review
The novelist Benjamin Cheever once brilliantly summed up New Yorker fiction as the kind of story where nothing much happens, but you feel a little sad about it anyway. Alice Munro's wonderful short stories (12 volumes of them so far), many of them originally published in The New Yorker, can mostly be said to fall into this category. But in old age she seems to be moving in a new direction, for things do happen in the ten tales that make up Too Much Happiness: lots of things, sometimes violent things. The tone is set in the very first story, "Dimensions," a disturbing look into the mind of a young woman to whom unspeakable damage has been done.
We first encounter Doree as she rides the bus to prison to visit her husband. She is a motel chambermaid: "She liked the work -- it occupied her thoughts to a certain extent and tired her our so that she could sleep at night." Why does she wish to have her thoughts occupied? What images does she wish to banish from them? Little by little, Munro reveals the chilling events that have led up to this moment: her meeting with Lloyd, an aging hippie, when she was only 16; his psychological domination of her; his growing paranoia; at last, unthinkably, his murder of their three children.
After a lifetime spent honing her natural narrative gifts, Munro is able to spin this out in mesmeric style. But the masterstroke is the way she gets across Doree's current state of mind, the thought processes that make her continue to visit Lloyd against the advice of well-trained therapists and social workers, and to believe that he is the only person, in the end, who can fully share her pain. As always, Munro demonstrates an extraordinary ability to inhabit the minds of characters who bear little surface resemblance to her, and she is also far more at ease than most contemporary writers with a wide range of social classes.
Recognizing this quality in her work, Munro has suggested that a life spent in the small towns of southern Ontario has exposed her to a wider range of human types than she might have encountered in an urban existence, where people are more stratified both socially and professionally. This seems a plausible theory and goes far toward answering the ever-interesting question of why it is that quintessentially urban writers (Joyce, Dickens, Balzac) present a more complex but not necessarily richer vision of human life than rural or "regional" authors (Faulkner, Hardy, Flaubert). Munro's protagonists come from both ends of the social spectrum, and they are of every age: in fact in a couple of these tales, "Fiction" and "Free Radicals," the author kaleidoscopes different periods of her characters' lives together in a long view one seldom sees in short fiction. And in "Some Women," a close-to-perfect piece of work, she demonstrates her facility with the child's-eye view of adult life, a technique originally made famous by Henry James's What Maisie Knew.
The now-elderly narrator of "Some Women" looks back on the late 1940s, when at the age of13 she got a summer job fetching and carrying for a cranky old lady, Mrs. Crozier. Mrs. Crozier's son is dying of leukemia in an upstairs bedroom; his wife, Sylvia, has a job teaching summer school two afternoons a week, which stigmatizes her in the eyes of the town: "People were just down on her because she had got an education," the narrator remembers. "Another thing they said was that she could have stayed home and looked after him now, as promised in the marriage ceremony, instead of going out to teach."
Need any more be said about the narrowness and meanness of this community? Old Mrs. Crozier doesn't like her intellectual daughter-in-law any more than the rest of the town does, and when a sexy, narcissistic masseuse named Roxanne begins coming to the house to work on the old lady's aches and pains, we see, through the narrator's half-comprehending gaze, a sinister alliance grow between the two women, culminating in their ungodly contest against Sylvia, the wedded wife, for an "almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier." "The carnality at death's door -- or the true love, for that matter -- were things I had to shake off like shivers down my spine."
Munro's characterization of Roxanne, deftly accomplished through a minimum of dialogue, gesture, and allusion, is immediately recognizable. "I began to understand that there were certain talkers -- certain girls -- whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people -- people like me -- who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway." In this case the crude character is observed from the outside; in another marvelous story, "Child's Play," the narrator herself diagnoses the crudity -- the evil, as it turns out -- in herself.
The title story of the collection is an experiment, at least in Munrovian terms; though it doesn't quite come off it is of interest, as of course is almost anything this writer produces. Fifty-seven pages long, "Too Much Happiness" is Munro's imagining of the life of an actual 19th-century Russian woman, Sophia Kovalevsky (1850-91), who first came to Munro's attention in the Encyclopedia Britannica. "The combination of novelist and mathematician immediately caught my interest, and I began to read everything about her I could find. One book enthralled me beyond all others," she writes: Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky, by Don H. Kennedy. Kovalevsky's life story is indeed fascinating: she succeeded in becoming a world-class mathematician at a time when there were no academic posts for women in Russia or almost anywhere else in Europe (only Swedish universities opened their doors to her), and she lived through dramatic historical events, including the 1871 Paris Commune. "Too Much Happiness" makes pleasant enough reading, but as with so many fictionalized versions of real people and events, one can't help thinking that the actual biography -- in this case Little Sparrow -- probably has more to offer.
So Alice Munro, despite the hints she dropped that her previous fiction collection (The View From Castle Rock) would be her last, is still going strong, and still growing and developing. It will be interesting to see what surprises she might have in store for the future. --Brooke Allen
Brooke Allen is the author of Twentieth-Century Attitudes; Artistic License; and Moral Minority. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, and The Nation, among others. She was named a finalist for the 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.
From the Publisher
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.
In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
Too Much Happiness is a compelling, provocative—even daring—collection.
Publishers Weekly
Munro's latest collection is satisfyingly true to form and demonstrates why she continues to garner laurels (such as this year's Man Booker International Prize). Through carefully crafted situations, Munro breathes arresting life into her characters, their relationships and their traumas. In “Wenlock Edge,” a college student in London, Ontario, acquires a curious roommate in Nina, who tricks the narrator into a revealing dinner date with Nina's paramour, the significantly older Mr. Purvis. “Child's Play,” a dark story about children's capacity for cruelty and the longevity of their secrets, introduces two summer camp friends, Marlene and Charlene, who form a pact against the slightly disturbing Verna, whose family used to share Marlene's duplex. The title, and final, story, the collection's longest and most ambitious, takes the reader to 19th-century Europe to meet Sophia Kovalevski, a talented mathematician and novelist who grapples with the politics of the age and the consequences of success. While this story lacks some of the effortlessness found in Munro's finest work, the collection delivers what she's renowned for: poignancy, flesh and blood characters and a style nothing short of elegant. (Nov.)
Kirkus Reviews
Every story collection from Canada's Alice Munro receives such critical plaudits that it's tempting for reviewers to recycle superlatives and readers to take her for granted. But there is no such thing as just "another" Munro release. Each time, she extends her work in a manner that redefines it. Her latest doesn't represent as radical a repositioning as its predecessor, The View from Castle Rock (2006), which Munro introduced as a story cycle different than anything she had published before, based on generations of her family's historical record as reflected in journals, letters and the writer's research. But most of the stories in Too Much Happiness-and most of them are shorter than usual for Munro-also concern the relationship between life and storytelling, how the construction of narrative reveals deeper truths or uncomfortable lies. In one of the stories, simply titled "Fiction," the protagonist finds her own life recast in the stories of her divorced husband's stepdaughter. "How Are We to Live is the book's title," she relates. "A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is hanging on the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside."Ha! No modern writer this side of Raymond Carver has opened that gate wider for the story's literary regard, though Munro's fiction has more of a novelistic scope and scale than the elliptical, tightly focused work of Carver (and so many other short-story writers). In less than 30 pages, "Fiction" combines the chronological expanse of a novel with an artful compression that merges the events as remembered by the protagonistand the fiction it has inspired. Even more powerfully, "Child's Play" concerns the stories we concoct in order to live with ourselves. The question posed to the girlhood protagonist-"How can you blame a person for the way she was born?"-carries greater resonance as she achieves the maturity of the narrative perspective, climaxing in a stunning confessional about childhood complicity and guilt. Title aside, there is far more death than happiness in these stories-the body count, though not the violence, rivals a Cormac McCarthy novel. Yet the title story, the longest and last, arrives at an epiphany that combines ecstasy and mortality in a manner that puts all that has come before-in this volume and throughout Munro's career-in blindingly fresh light. As Munro explains in her acknowledgements, it's a story based on the final days of Sophia Kovalevski, a brilliant Russian mathematician who also wrote fiction that enraged her father. "Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?" he sputters after a magazine edited by Dostoyevsky publishes her. Here, Munro herself reads like a Russian master. It's hard to imagine that anyone could write stories richer than these. Until the next Munro collection. First printing of 125,000
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