There has never been much doubt over where Alice Munro is calling from. For almost 50 years now, southwestern Ontario during the middle 20th century has been her Yoknapatawpha County, her Winesburg, Ohio. So thoroughly has Munro explored every dimly lit farmhouse and every dead-end knoll of this universe that it is easy to forget that, like William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson before her, she had to invent a place before it could become so real.
Such forgetting is not possible with “The View From Castle Rock,” Munro’s latest and oddly unbalanced collection of stories. In a foreword, she explains the book’s matter-of-fact origins. “I was doing something closer to what a memoir does – exploring life, my own life,” she writes, “but not in an austere or rigorously factual way.”
In other words, “The View From Castle Rock” is an embellished memoir. It just never takes on the ballast of fiction – which it claims to be. Stories struggle to pull free from their autobiographical roots, drawing our focus to matters of Munro’s lineage rather than to her characters’ emotional lives.
In the first story, “No Advantages,” we learn that Munro’s clan’s name is Laidlaw and that her forebears came from a farm in Scotland called Far Hope. “Hope means a bay, not a bay filled with water but with land,” she writes, anticipating the landlocked life that her ancestors found in America. The tale, such as it is, seems earthbound itself, a chronicle without a story arc or dramatic turn.
Soon after, the energetic title story introduces the people who made the passage over, moving briskly from one character to the next on their chaotic voyage. It would be a triumph as fiction, except that Munro keeps interrupting her own gorgeous prose to quote from actual accounts of the voyage. After a remarkable scene in which a man offers his daughter to one of Munro’s ancestors in exchange for land, the author peels us off for a journal entry: “We were becalmed the 21st and 22nd but we had rather more wind the 23rd.”
It’s not hard to understand why anyone entering her middle 70s would be drawn to this sort of genealogical dig, but it’s disorienting to see a writer as sure-footed as Munro with so little control over her material. It seems like whenever the reader is about to gain some purchase on the prose, another one of Munro’s many authorial intrusions arrives.
“The View From Castle Rock” makes clear what many of Munro’s readers have long suspected – that her personal past has been Munro’s wormhole into her own imagination. Perhaps the mythology she has created over 11 collections is not too far from the truth. And yet, in pulling back the curtain on her writing process, Munro has reminded us that he exquisite refining of the raw material from her life makes all the difference in the world.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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The View From Castle Rock
By Alice Munro
Knopf, 349 pages, $25.95
