Friend of My Youth: Stories (1990)

I liked this book better than the others I've read. ( )

Whew! She is so obsessed with death in these stories. And this was published in 1990. I've noticed it in recent volumes, but it's a preoccupation that would be expected at her age.

Anyway, you know what you're getting with Munro: expertly crafted stories about women, unreliable men, extramarital affairs. Usually (too often, really) the women are girls when Munro was (40-50s) and some to a pivotal age as the sexual revolution hit. Almost always here, the stores take place somewhere in Ontario.

But she does end up in Scotland. In that case, a widow is visiting a place where her husband was stationed during WW2 and happens upon the young girlfriend of her husband's youth. In later books, one deduces that Munro herself went back to Scotland to trace her own family's emigration.

There is some foreshadowing here of Munro's "historical" stories which dominated (at least in my mind) View from Castle Rock. Notably "Maneseteung", in which the life of a town's late 19th century "poetess" is imagined. (Menseteung being a river.). It's just so easy for me to imagine: in a small town, you know the bare outlines--the dates, the slim volume, maybe the cemetery stone--of some town's claim to fame. And she fills it in: the rhythms of Almeda Roth's life and then this barely there acquaintance with the hardworking Jarvis Poulter--walks to church-- that could have become marriage.

"But he follows. He follows her as far as the back door and into the back hall. He speaks to her in a tone of harsh joviality that she has never before heard from him .. He had not been able to imagine her as a wife. Now that is possible. He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair--prematurely gray but thick and soft--her flushed face, her light clothing, which nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need?"

Even if the subject matter isn't of much interest, writers must or should read her for mastery of craft. There's the efficient way she sketches a character. I kept noticing how much she moves back and forth in time but it's all so seamless. She often starts with a very vivid childhood memory, often involving a childhood friend or adversary, and then we're way ahead somewhere in adulthood. Oh, she might shift back again but I become so absorbed in the present day, I usually forget how the story started. Yet it's always tightly tied together again. Sure, that childhood incident or the haphazard mother explains something about the way the adult *is* but the dots are never straight.

The story I know I had read before, perhaps long ago in an anthology, was "Differently." It's a familiar Munro situation: the youngish married mother, Georgia, in Vancouver, reacting to the quakes of the early 1970s, has an affair that ultimately ends her marriage. But I had totally forgotten the main details, the centrality of Georgia's friendship with another (philandering) woman. And that Georgia has to leave her husband because she fell so easily into an affair with a man she doesn't care about at all. ( )

Down-beat tales of small town life in Ontario. She seems to be fond of writing about people whose lives have been a disappointment to them. Well-written and very interesting, if a trifle depressing. ( )

Flaky Genius and I are currently reading this collection and other Munro stories for a class she's taking and the writing is universally great. The only complaint both of us have for Munro is why does every story, almost every single story, have to have someone having an affair. It's interesting and she always does it well, but after a while the schtick is just that -- a schtick. The predictability of this aspect is such that the moment I meet a third character in the story who is not immediately painted as a buffoon or completely outside the pale, I start a countdown to cheating. ( )

Powerful, understated characters leave one thinking: Reading stories such as "Differently," about a woman's reminiscences and regret about the people of her past made me reflect that life turns out differently than our original aspirations. It isn't always regret, but it is rarely indifferent. As soon as I finished a story, I immediately wanted to reread it, and understand the character better. These are beautiful, gentle stories about lives that sometimes meander, sometimes change abruptly, but that are always determined by the choices and accidents of living. Munro's love, sometimes curiosity, for her characters is a privilege to experience.