When presenting the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said Alice Munro “writes about what are usually called ordinary people, but her intelligence, compassion and astonishing power of perception enable her to give their lives a remarkable dignity — indeed redemption — since she shows how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jampacked emptiness called “The Ordinary.”
So it is with the 24 stories in “Family Furnishings,” a selection culled from the past 20 years. The general locations are the derelict, agrarian towns of southwest Ontario and the differently unhappy cities of British Columbia. And the recurring themes are treachery, hidden menace, falling in and out of love, and the weariness and sentimental pessimism of those who accept sorrow as their habitual portion in life.
In the first story, boys find the fat corpse of an optometrist filling out his little Austin-Healey deep in the Peregrine River. But, as Jane Smiley writes in her fine introduction to “Family Furnishings,” Munro swerves away from the intrigues and excitements of a murder mystery to contemplate instead the quotidian, “the emotional life and the thought processes of Enid, a good woman, who makes her living caring for difficult patients, and who has a lingering fondness for Rupert, a boy she and her friends had teased in middle school.”
Another character like Enid is Johanna Parry, a plain, lovelorn caretaker lured far west to a failing man in Saskatchewan by letters of courtship that shifty girls composed as a prank. But years pass, and one of the girls, now grown, discovers that Johanna had indeed married the man, and the couple has an infant named Omar. “It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her — it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?”
In “Runaway,” Carla, a horse stabler, wants to separate from her sour, threatening husband, who “thought families were like a poison in your blood.” Mrs. Jamieson, a widow for whom she does housekeeping, gets entangled instead with Carla’s husband, and a forsaken Carla fails to run away.
Dissimilar to most of her fiction but equally dazzling are “Home” and “The View from Castle Rock.” Rifling through some family history, Munro felt compelled to construct a first-person saga based on the Scottish Laidlaws and their emigration to Ontario. Hewing closer to fact than she usually does, she still fictionalizes much, even regarding her own life. She fantasizes, for example, in “Home”: “I think of a man who let his cows starve to death one winter after his mother died, not because he was frozen in grief but because he couldn’t be bothered going out to the barn to feed them, and there was nobody to tell him he had to. I can believe that, I can imagine it. I can see myself as a middle-aged daughter who did her duty, stayed at home, thinking that someday her chance would come, until she woke up and knew it wouldn’t. Now she reads all night and doesn’t answer her door, and comes out in a surly trance to spread hay for the sheep.”
“Working for a Living,” “The Eye” and “Dear Life” — the somewhat fictionalized memoirs of Munro’s childhood in Ontario — are, as she noted in an earlier collection, “the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life.” She’s 83 now and claims that she has retired from fiction writing. If that is indeed the case — I hope it’s not — the selections in “Family Furnishings” are a fitting, final reminder of what a stunning, subtle and sympathetic explorer of the heart she is.
FICTION: SHORT STORIES
Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014
by Alice Munro (Knopf)
