Lives of Girls and Women

Chosen for our book group because of Munro's recent death, this was a fantastic read. I haven't read anything by her because I am not a fan of short stories and even though it could be argued this was not really a novel, it was more novel than a set of themed short stories.

The novel tells of the coming-of-age of Del, the narrator who is gradually revealed to us. The stories/chapters each detail a particular point in the growing up but also include all the details of small town life that are going on around Del and her family. We start with Flats Road where Del and her family live much to her mother's chagrin. The place is aptly named with Del's mother saying that they live at the end of Flats Road to make it sound as if they don't come show more from there. In this story we are introduced to the fact that Del's mother is a disappointed woman but one who has modern ideas that don't fit with the rest of her local society or family and who reminds me not a little of Mrs Bucket (pronounced Bouquet). This out of the way, small place is contrasted with the big city where Uncle Benny goes to rescue a little girl and who gets completely and utterly lost and can only come home, never getting to the address that he was searching for. Surely, this is a metaphor for their lives.

The third story, Princess Ida, shifts focus to Del's mother and being unfulfilled in terms of education. By this time, Del and her mother are living in Jubilee whilst Del's father and brother remain out on the edge of the country at the fox farm. Del's mother tries to break into the society where she feels she belongs but it appears desperate and she is ignored by the other women and eventually gives up. It is at this point that Del realises that she is embarrased by her mother and starts to consider her own place in the world.

For the women in this book there is a constant struggle between pride, shame, ambition and education versus sex, jobs and families. I loved the Aunts in the second story, Heirs of the Living Body, who were clever but trained to be domestic and were excellent at it. But sometimes, their cleverness slipped out as they discussed others,

The nimble malice that danced under their courtesies . . .
p49

The writing is sublime, smooth and flowing with all the detail of small towns beautifully brought to our attention. When talking about the woman who led the book club in Jubilee, Munro writes

She had a magnificent name she would serve up to people sometimes, like a scaly fish on a platter, all its silvery, scaly syllables intact, but it was no use, nobody in Jubilee could pronounce or remember it.
p92

In one sentence we learn of the town's difficulties with a foreign name, their attitudes towards it, and how its owner played on this.

I am pretty sure one of the questions that we will discuss will in some way focus on the different ways men and girls and women are portrayed in the book.

The men are frequently weak or failures - Del's dad and her brother and the failed fox farm, uncultured - Uncle Benny, abusive - Uncle Craig, violent and religious zealots, unattractive physically although interesting intellectually.

The women are often under-educated but clever, long -suffering, constantly butting up against society's expectations, spinsters and beautiful but very young. Del is a girl/woman who knows she wants more than Jubilee can offer and that she wants to be a writer. Marriage, babies, housework - she knows this is not for her and has seen the humiliation and shame this has brought on her mother. show less

I gave myself two days to settle with this book before even attempting a review. Two days of thinking and reflecting and confirming the marvel that is this book. As one can tell from the title of the book, Munro focuses on the relationships between girls and women in this book and each chapter marked a new development for Del, the protagonist of this story.

Del is a precocious girl living first at the outskirts and then in the poor small town of Jubilee, Canada. Her mother writes in the paper and sells encyclopedias, and is considered an eccentric for her agnosticism, beliefs in women’s reproductive rights and other notions that of course must have been extremely “liberal” in a small and religious town in the 1940s, and her father show more is a fox farmer who lingers at the edges of the story for the most part.

Told in the first person and from Del’s point of view, we journey with her through her childhood and the characters that people her life and thoughts, her awakenings and conflicts and disasters and emerge with her at the end, fully nourished. The kind of story that grows and grows with each turn of the page, filled with brilliant understandings of life, death, spiritualit(ies)y, friendships and love.

One of the most exciting and fascinating aspects of this story is the town of Jubilee itself and the rich detail Munro furnishes it with. From its economic and recreational activities to the townspeople themselves, she creates such an intricate mesh, a breathing steaming town.
If you liked Toni Morrison’s [b:Sula|11346|Sula|Toni Morrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441578153s/11346.jpg|3207953], William Maxwell’s [b:So Long, See You Tomorrow|14276|So Long, See You Tomorrow|William Maxwell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390750749s/14276.jpg|1267189], Willa Cather’s [b:My Ántonia|17150|My Ántonia (Great Plains Trilogy, #3)|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389151307s/17150.jpg|575450] or [b:The Neapolitan Novels|26828169|The Neapolitan Novels|Elena Ferrante|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443412457s/26828169.jpg|46858867] of Elena Ferrante, then you’ll most likely like this one too. With this book Munro solidifies her place in my heart as one of my favourite writers, a great book. show less

A masterful and seminal work of prose fiction, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women explores the place of women in mid-20th-century society and pivots on the gradual awakening of narrator Del Jorden to the realization that there is more to being female than catering to the needs of men. Resembling a collection of linked stories more so than a standard novel, Munro’s deeply felt, minutely observed narrative describes Del’s pre-teen and teenage years growing up in Jubilee, a small town in rural Ontario, in the years before, during and immediately following World War II. On the surface, Del’s upbringing does not challenge the boundaries of convention. Her father is an unassertive man who supports his family by raising foxes for show more pelts. Her mother is a housewife who has known hardship. But there is nothing conventional about Del’s approach to life, which is skeptical and outward-looking. Del’s intrepid, tireless curiosity is driven primarily by her vivacious, opinionated mother, who harbours lofty ambitions for her brainy daughter. (Indeed, as presented to the reader, Del’s father is little more than a cipher and plays a minimal role in her childhood.) In the opening story, “The Flats Road,” Del is living with her mother, father and younger brother Owen outside Jubilee on a shabby property where her father keeps his foxes and a few other animals. It is a neighbourhood populated by misfits and eccentrics where everyone is poor. Later on, Del has moved into Jubilee with her mother where they live in a rented house on River Street. Her mother takes in boarders, and, in “Princess Ida,” has embarked on a career selling encyclopedias. For Del on the cusp of womanhood, her mother—who does not attend church and expresses an acute disdain bordering on hostility for organized religion—who loves opera and pushes her daughter to excel at school—is a source of pride, embarrassment and inspiration. The novel chronicles the growth of Del’s complex interior life along with her occasionally reckless forays in the external world, and depicts her sexual awakening, her evolving attitude toward boys and love and the mysterious world beyond Jubilee that, she comes to realize, will nurture her but also try to crush her. The novel shows us Del’s struggles with her maturing body and the triumphs and misadventures that shape her into a self-aware young woman with a loving heart who values knowledge and independence. Lives of Girls and Women is a truthful, candid, supremely intelligent novel. Sometimes shocking, it is elegantly written with humour and irony. This is a novel that confronts human desire and depravity head on. It is not Alice Munro’s style to cushion the blow, to spare her characters suffering. Del Jordan often fails, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Her struggles are universal and sear themselves on the reader’s memory. Del Jordan is one of the most authentically human fictional characters you will ever encounter. Once you’ve read her story you will not forget her. show less

The title of this novel by short story writer Alice Munro comes from the chapter of the same name in which Del Jordan's mother says to her "there is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it all come. . . ". Published in 1972 during the rise of modern feminism its main characters are girls and women and their "making sense" of their world.

Like Munro's "The Beggar Maid," published later, this book consists of interconnected stories. However, the time frame here is much shorter than the later one and, therefore with fewer gaps in time, reads more like a novel.

It is the coming-of-age story of Del Jordan, from her early years at home on the farm, through her school days in town and, finally, show more graduation from high school. We learn of her early interest in reading and writing, and see her shaping her spiritual beliefs, sharing tittilating secrets with her best friend, her first crushes and first loves. Vignettes of people and events give a nostalgic and often very funny view of small town life.

The characters in the story are so carefully drawn with Munro's characteristic turn of phrase that they are brought vividly to life. None is more alive than Del's mother and her relationship with Del. While often disparaging of the remarks and advice of her mother, Del grows up with her own version of her mother's worldview.

An epilogue, a story in itself, describes Del's imagining her first short story, how it would be about her small town, and how she would change names and places to create something new, but based on truth. I suspect it is how this novel was constructed.

This early book is one in an oeuvre of work worthy of the Nobel Prize for literature, which Munro won in 2013. show less

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro is a collection of inter-woven short stories that chronicle the coming-of-age of Del Jordan and her relationships with various characters in the small Ontario town of Jubilee. Some classify this work as a novel but however one defines the book, the author’s gift of capturing human emotions through her beautiful and understated writing shines through.

The author captures many of the thoughts and feelings that females go through as they grow from little girls to young women. The uncertainty of maturing at different rates from one’s friends, the feelings of being left behind by one’s peers, the curiosity about life in general and sex in particular are told with humour, pathos, and drama. In show more writing about everyday events, Munro’s talent for remarkable and relatable prose is highlighted.

Lives of Girls and Women was my introduction to Alice Munro and this empathetic story about one young girl’s rites of passage was a pleasure to read. show less

I thought when I picked this up that it was a collection of short stories. It's not. It's a novel, albeit one that seems at first to be fairly loosely structured, about a girl coming of age in a small town in Ontario during and after World War II. It's the first thing of Munro's I've read aside from a couple of stories I encountered in anthologies, but based on those -- and, I guess, on the fact that she has a Nobel Prize to her name -- I expected to be impressed by this one, and I was not disappointed. Munro's writing is, well, impressive. She has a great talent for describing things -- people, places, emotions, experiences -- in perfectly apt, subtly insightful ways, and the result here simultaneously feels like one woman's very show more specific, personal story and like a broad, deep, realistic reflection on the lives of girls and women in general. show less

RIP to one of only 17 women to win the Nobel Prize for Literature: Alice Munro, 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024. She wrote a huge number of short stories, plus this novel.

Image: Alice Munro (Source, The Independent obit)

This is my favourite sort of novel: writing that is acute, astute, and beautiful, sugaring deeper questions and messages that take time to ferment and mature.

“All weekend thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about... I was constantly letting go and tumbling into it.”
I felt similarly about Del Jordan, though for completely different reasons.

This is my first encounter with Munro, and it’s her only novel. It is not far removed from short stories, with Del show more describing her childhood and adolescence in seven episodic, loosely-themed (death, God, friendships, sex, ambition etc), but chronological chapters, plus a short epilogue in different style. The prose is carefully crafted to seem simple, as are the brilliantly relatable insights and anxieties of an adolescent girl's life.

It’s raw and realistic. It’s subtly philosophical without ever being pretentious. And it exposes the hopes and fears of different and changing gender expectations, without ever being academic or preachy.

Universal

“Where she was going I did not want to go. But things were progressing for her…
She had moved as far beyond me in… the real world, as I in all sorts or remote and useless and special knowledge… had moved beyond her.”

Most of us don’t question our gender, but I expect everyone has pondered aspects of the societal expectations that are based on it, especially in our teen years: whether girls can show cleverness, how to handle relationships with friends and potential partners as bodies change and hormones rage, what ambition girls can have beyond marriage, the meaning of death and life… You know; the little things. It’s not an original concept for a novel, but Munro executes it exquisitely.

Del lives in the small Ontario town of Jubilee, during and after WW2. Her father raises silver foxes for fur. Her mother is eccentric (but with “odd little pockets of conventionality”), opinionated, and aspirational: an atheist who sells encyclopaedias. Her younger brother, Owen, is mostly in the margins, as little brothers often are.

It’s a time of great change, especially for girls and women, and the most influential characters in her life are predominantly female: mother, aunts, friends, friends’ mothers, and teachers.

She reminded me strongly of a cross between a Carson McCullers character and myself (despite differences of geography, decades, and reality). In particular, her tussles with God and religion: wanting to believe and to feel, to belong, yet not quite expecting it, maybe not wholeheartedly wanting it, were hallmarks of my adolescence too.

It’s a small town, but it encompasses a range circumstances and beliefs, both between individuals, and within individuals over time: degrees of conformity, educated and not, rural and suburban, comfortable and poor, religious (different denominations) and not, single/chaste and married.

Nature, nurture, or both? Can we escape our past and our presumed destiny? Is Del made by Jubilee and the women in it, or does she make herself?

Tenses

“It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past.”
Uncle Craig is devoted to genealogy (the past). Mother is devoted to knowledge (the past in service of the future). Others are devoted to God (present and future/eternal), and to romance, marriage, and sex (mostly in the present, but not necessarily in that order).

Teenagers try to wrestle free of the past, of their parents, as they try to forge their futures, and Del tries out different personae and priorities. I felt the gentle pain of small-town adolescence, where there is no anonymity, no privacy. The ambivalent, confused feelings of a child-adult, present and future, about her changing body, the bodies of others, and the implications and opportunities arising, is brilliantly, realistically, comically, and painfully portrayed.

Christmas baubles on a summer sponge cake

Munro has a knack for dropping an unexpected word in an otherwise ordinary phrase - the most outstanding aspect of this novel for me. Most are not quite oxymorons, but they startle, and make me refocus my mind to see things in a new way. We are all a strange and sometimes uncomfortable mix of characters and emotions, regardless of the masks we wear:

• "A delicate predatory face"
• "Horrific playfulness" of hyperbolic crimes
• “Prosaic as a hiccup” (parents downstairs when children in bed)
• "Heartless applause"
• “Fierce but somehow helpless expressions”
• "Authoritative typing"
• "Nimble malice that danced under their courtesies"
• “Putting her rouge on at the dark mirror”
• “Relatives… looking benevolent, but voluntarily apart”
• “My mother’s voice… unwillingly deferential.”
• “Their artificiality bloomed naturally” (women in the presence of a man)
• “I felt my anonymity like a decoration”
• “Nosing along, almost silently, like an impudent fish” (a big American car)
• “Pure-hearted indifference” (brother Owen’s attitude to God)
• “His grinning pessimism, his mournful satisfied predictions”
• “A foreboding, yet oddly permissive, tone of voice” (about sex)
• “Windy yellow evening” (Spring)
• “The landscape was postcoital, distant and meaningless.”
• “A worried jovial face”
• “His face contained… fierceness and sweetness”
• “His dark, amiable but secretive face”

The final chapter is another unexpected contrast. It’s almost from another book, another writer. It’s shorter than the others, and Del reflects on the motives and meaning of fictionalising real life, with a slight magical-realist aspect, infused with the wisdom of one who was presumed a fool.

Other Quotes

No spoilers, just hidden for easy scrolling.

• “The deep, deep, layered clutter and dirt of the place swallowed light.”

• “The Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference.”

• “Knowledge. A chilly commodity that most people, grown up, can agree to do without.”

• Soldiers’ uniforms “had an aura of anonymous brutality like the smell of burning.”

• “A dome of light, a bubble radiant and indisputable… He would flower suddenly as a bank of day lilies.” How Del hopes God might reveal himself.

• “Rituals which in other circumstances might have seemed wholly artificial, had here [church] a kind of last-ditch dignity.”

• “I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds.”

• “We knew too much about each other to ever stop being friends.”

• “It’s the girl who is responsible because our sex organs are on the inside and theirs are on the outside and we can control our urges better” - a friend quoting her mother, who is a nurse!

• Del’s first sight of a penis: “It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes... It did not seem frightening... Raw and blunt, ugly-colored as a wound, it looked to me vulnerable, playful and naive... It did not seem to have anything to do with me.”

• “She sent those [school] operettas up like bubbles, shaped with quivering, exhausting effort, then almost casually set free, to fade and fade but hold trapped forever our transformed childish selves.”

• Meeting the parents: “Each of us was suspected of carrying the seeds of contamination… atheism… [and] sexual preoccupation.”

• “It was that stage of transition, bridge between what was possible, known and normal behaviour, and the magical, bestial act, that I could not imagine.”

• “No foul shimmer of corruption… the skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness” - a prostitute is disappointingly ordinary.

• “I knew I was altered by his presence.”

• “Love is not for the undepilated.”

• “I would try to recreate the exact texture of his skin, touching my own, try to remember accurately the varying texture of his fingers.”

• “Sex seemed to me all surrender - not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, a act of pure faith, freedom in humility.”

• “We were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights.”


Postscript 1 - McCullers and other influences

After reading the book and writing this review, I pondered McCullers some more. I had assumed there might not bet enough of an age gap for much influence, but then I found this (undated) interview here, including this question and answer:
What writers have most influenced you and who do you like to read?
"When I was young it was Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee. Then Updike, Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Taylor, and especially and forever, William Maxwell. Also William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Richard Ford. These I would say are influences. There are dozens of others I just like to read. My latest discovery is a Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom."

Postscript 2 - Atwood loves this

Image: Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood in 2005 (Source, CNN obit)

In The Testaments (see my review HERE), this is one of Aunt Lydia's five favourite books! She also wrote an appreciation of Munro in The Guardian in 2008, HERE.

See also

I've reviewed these Munro short story collections:
• Dear Life, HERE
• Runaway, HERE
And this short story:
• How I Met my Husband, HERE show less