Runaway

The trouble with Alice Munro is that she is so consistently good at what she does that I want to say almost exactly the same things about this collection as about all the others I've read so far. Every story in the book takes you unmistakably into Alice Munro country, that world in which people are unaccountably drawn to ruin their lives by misreading a situation or failing to grasp an opportunity (more often than not an opportunity three or four decades ago). But each story also does something radical and unique to bend the formula of the short story in a way that you would have sworn before reading it couldn't be done. There ought to be a law against it, but fortunately there isn't...

When I'm not reading Alice Munro's stories, I remember that I like her writing, but I forget what it is I like about them. Every time I go back, then, I get a sense of the familiar.

Oh, yeah! I think. This is what I like about her stories!

In Munro's stories are lessons in the commonplace, but mostly her characters ignore these lessons, even when they're practically written in neon for them. If they do learn the lesson, it's too late to really do anything about it other than grow as a person, and what's the point of that? Her characters say things they shouldn't and leave things unsaid that they should say. They're selfish with their love. They use, or try to use, relationships with others to get them out of relationships or situations show more they don't have the courage to get out of themselves. They fear owning up to their mistakes and the qualities they dislike in themselves and, most of all, rejection so much that they don't go searching for people they should search for. They let things slide that shouldn't slide and hold onto things that are better let go. More than anything else, they lie to themselves.

Munro's characters are remarkably human. There are no dramatic gestures here. No one is being swept off their feet, and if it seems like they are, you know there's a catch. Her relationships are profoundly, prosaically sad. And maybe this is why I put so much time between Munro's stories. Although I admire the hell out of her writing, I can only handle so much reality at once. show less

I don’t think it’s an overreaction to say Alice Munro is one of the greatest short story writers I’ve ever read. Almost every story in this collection ranks among the greatest short stories I’ve ever read (Chance; Soon; Silence; Trespasses; Passion; Tricks; Powers). The only one I didn’t care a whole lot for was the title story, Runaway. Munro is a master of the medium.

The stories in this collection are about the lives and relationships of lower/middle-class Canadian women. The relationships are about lovers, companions, friends, husbands/wives, mentors/mentees, mothers/fathers/children; common themes are independence, fear, loneliness, social/cultural constraints on women, how people change, and how they really don’t show more change at all. They are not very optimistic stories, in general. People fall into the same old self-defeating patterns, people are abandoned, they age, they divorce, they miss opportunities, etc.

Memory and time’s passing are two themes coursing through the best of these stories. Munro likes to build up characters at young ages and then quickly jump forward decades in their lives. We first see them young and vitalized, swept up in dramas of youth (money, marriage, status, possessions). Then, we see them much later, with so many hopes disappointed and dreams unfulfilled. The reader is left with an aching for these characters’ lost potential selves, futures that never arrived, roads once open and now closed off forever. These themes are extremely potent and universal and I’m honestly surprised more writers don’t focus on them. Who among us does not mourn for that which never came about? I know at times I feel really bereaved for the missed potentialities of my life, for the chances at relationships with other people and places that never happened and never will, that now exist only in my memory. It’s a lonely, bitter thing.

I’m totally awed by Munro’s stories: carefully composed, utterly human, always relevant. She’s worth reading, I promise.

A great quote from Powers: “Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste out powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing the things we should have, or would have, liked to do?” show less

I always say I'm not really a fan of short stories but in the hand of a master like Alice Munro I am transformed. I think you have to be a consummate writer to craft a short story that doesn't leave the reader wishing there was more. On the front of this book the New York Times Book Review is quoted "Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America." I may not have the breadth of experience that the reviewers of the New York Times have but I do think Munro is a fabulous writer.

All of these stories deal with people who have run away or been abandoned or sometimes run away and then been abandoned. I think it is interesting that these stories are not contemporary; they mostly are set between the show more two world wars or just after the Second World War. I think it was maybe easier then to run away and not be found. Today with the World Wide Web and instant methods of communicating and the need to document all your financial transactions it is much less likely that people could disappear.

My favourite story was the last one, Powers. Two couples are contrasted in this story. On the one hand there is Nancy and Wilf, the couple that stayed in their Ontario town for most of their life where Wilf had a successful doctor's practise. On the other hand are Tessa and Ollie. Ollie is Wilf's cousin who met Tessa when Ollie came to town after spending time in a sanatorium for TB. Tessa has the power to find lost objects as well as some other extrasensory powers. Nancy introduced Ollie and Tessa but was surprised when Tessa went away with Ollie. Years later Nancy is called to a mental institution where Tessa has been for years and Ollie is presumed dead. The institution is being shut down and the authorities are looking for people to take the cases that no longer need to be in an institution. Nancy can't do this because Wilf has dementia and it is all she can do to look after him. Some time later, after Wilf's death, Nancy encounters Ollie on a street in Vancouver. Ollie tells Nancy that Tessa died of leukemia. Nancy doesn't disclose to Ollie that she knows differently. I can't help but ask myself what I would do in the same situation. That's always the mark of a good story for me. show less

I have always disliked short stories, because they are just that - short. most short story writers tend to write them bearing that fact in mind all the time: must pull myself together and be brief, it is a short story I am writing after all. well, munro is so good, she does not let you believe for a second that she is writing a short story. she leaves plenty of space between the lines and she is no rush at all - she has got all the time in the world or the whole world in there, whichever way you like. what can I say, she fooled me, and I loved it.

Reread in February 2020. Amazingly, I could not remember reading it before: is that a good thing?

Runaway: Noun or Verb?

As a noun, “runaway” conjures a fairly specific character and situation.

Image: Runaway child with backpack

But as a phrasal verb, running away is often much broader and more metaphorical.

Right now, writing this, while sitting at my laptop, I’m running away from planning a conference presentation. In the past, I have run away from physical fear (trying to climb a net); a job I hated so much it was making me ill; and from potential rejection (and thus from possible acceptance).

But more often, consciously or not, I stiffen my British upper lip and focus on surviving immediate difficulties, either by denial or by distracting myself with fripperies, against a background of hopeful detachment.

Living in the present show more can be a coping strategy for those with past trauma or a fearful future. I’m not really in either camp. But maybe as a symptom of enjoying fiction, if times are tricky, I default to imagining alternative situations, rather than face the one I’m actually living.

Image: My life is more interesting inside my head (I can’t find the original artist)

Even doing nothing is a decision of sorts.
“Never put off to tomorrow, what you can put off till next week.”
- said no successful, famous, and content person, ever.

I see the patterns of my behaviour, but not a generalised solution, no way to discern which approach to use when. This is frustrating, because wilful ignorance is an accidentally recurring theme of my recent reading: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (see my review HERE) and John Williams’ Nothing But the Night (see my review HERE), and now this.

Reading to Save Ourselves

My edition has an introduction by Jonathan Franzen. I read it in 2018, a year and a half into Trump’s presidency. But in 2004, Franzen wrote:
“Hatred is entertaining. The great insight of media-age extremists. How else to explain the election of so many repellant zealots, the disintegration of political civility, the ascendancy of Fox New?”

He ends up asking if a better kind of fiction can save the world, and concludes that’s unlikely, but it may save your soul.

That is why we read, and why we discuss on GR.

I think there is more worth in that thought than in some of these stories - except they are part of his solution.

A Mixed Bag

Three of the stories are episodes in the life of one character, Juliet, forming a novella. That is preceded and followed by other stories, which are unrelated, except they are all of similar length, have single-word titles, and share the general theme of a Canadian woman running away: from the past, from parents, from partners, from a child, from reality, from religion - and to it.

To quote from REM’s Belong, they want “To breathe at the thought of such freedom… Opened the window, A breath, this song, how long, And knew, knew, belong.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a mix of novella and short stories, but in this case, it added to the sense of unevenness in the collection.

The best of the stories were very good (though not superb, like Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women (see my review HERE)), but the final one was a ridiculous, disjointed, unengaging mess!

THE STORIES

Runaway 3*

Carla ran away to marry Clark.
“She saw him as the architect of the life ahead of them, herself as captive, her submission both proper and exquisite.”

They now run a stables, not very successfully, and are married, not very successfully. Carla is fonder of her pet goat, Flora. You sense casual manipulation and overt put-downs: a “see-saw misery”. Then, a more twisted plan, and a dash of almost magical-realism.

Chance (Juliet’s story, part 1) 4*

As a child in the suburbs, Juliet’s mother had wanted her to be popular, and her father to fit in:
“Her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb.”

She’s now a young classics teacher who views and interprets the world and people in it by analogies in Greek mythology. She has a strange experience and a curious encounter on a train. Blood is relevant for two very different reasons. The parallel narratives mean you’re not initially clear how or if they’re connected, and whether one is imaginary.

Soon (Juliet’s story, part 2) 3*

This opens with a description of a strange painting titled, “I and the Village”. Juliet takes her small daughter (Penelope) to visit her aging hippie parents, Sam and Sara, who “lived in a curious but not unhappy isolation”. Atheist Juliet is shocked that her mother has acquired some sort of faith, and angry when a priest friend of her mother’s criticizes her for depriving Penelope of a religious upbringing. It’s poignant, but firmly the middle part; it doesn’t work as well as a standalone story as parts 1 and 3.

Silence (Juliet’s story, part 3) 5*

Penelope is now 20, and has been away at a spiritual retreat for the last six months. Unlike the other stories in the collection, this one focuses on the one left behind, as she tries to join the dots, tormented by thoughts of what she should have done differently. It’s far more painful. Brilliantly so. There can be freedom in being abandoned. But freedom isn’t necessarily happiness.

Passion 4*

The risk of revisiting the past is that it has changed, gone, or is just irrelevant. Grace returns to the lake town where she had worked and fallen in love. Or rather, Maury fell in love with her. She seemed closer (though not in a sexual way) to his mother, who understood her passion for knowledge.

“Mrs Travers would not start any sort of conversation until enough time had passed for Grace’s thoughts to have got loose from whatever book she had been in.”

The title is as much about lack of passion (fear and inexperience made McEwan’s On Chesil Beach come to mind - see my review HERE) as misdirected passion. Two people running away from different things, in different ways, is not necessarily a recipe for a happy ending.

Trespasses 4*

The previous story started with a woman revisiting her past and ended with drama in a car. This separate story starts with four in a car, revisiting the past. The situation is intriguingly vague, as are the connections between the people, and the two timelines - rather like one of the characters:
“She talked about her life without getting it in any kind of order.”

It’s about identity and the sort of insecurities many children have about their place in the world, and especially their family. It looked as if it was going to be unoriginal and thus predictable. It was neither.
“If there was one big thing she hadn’t known about, why could there not be another? This notion was unsettling, but it had a distant charm.”

Tricks 5*

Robin (26) cares for her sickly older sister, Joanne. Her annual treat to herself is a trip to see a Shakespeare play, and his themes are the key to the story: lost and found, mistaken identity, opportunities lost by a sliver of chance, and the transformative effect of a curious and powerful connection.
“Nothing faded for her… Her memories, and the embroidery on her memories, just kept wearing a deeper groove.”

Powers 1*

A first person narration (mostly), starting earlier than the others, in 1927. Nancy has recently left school, but is still rather naive and childish in her extrovert and teasing ways. A male friend wonders why he hangs out with her, when she is:
“Not outstanding in any way, except perhaps in being spoiled, saucy, and egotistical.”
Nancy herself:
“Was truly, naturally reckless and full of some pure conviction that she led a charmed life.”
I didn’t buy it. Her friend Tessa seemed more charmed, living in the woods, doing psychic consultations, mainly to help people find lost things - including bodies.

Anyway, Nancy gets implausibly engaged, and then married, then there’s an epistolary section, and a bit of discussion of parapsychology. Later, the story turns more to Tessa, and the consequences of moderate fame, infamy, and investigation. There are chance meetings that are too convenient. The characters are mostly inconsistent and not credible. There’s mention of people’s need to believe in alternative reality. Very bitty time hops. The ending was odd and confusing.

This story was a mess. I hated it, and most of all, I hated that it was the last one of an otherwise very good collection.

Other Quotes

• “The whole countryside was changing, shaking itself loose” after a long period of endless rain.

• “They [outings] were what people did before they understood the realities of their lives.”

• “He was both a handsome man and a silly-looking man. Tall, lean, well built, but with a slouch that seemed artificial. A contrived, self-conscious air of menace… a vain little moustache, eyes that appeared both hopeful and mocking, a boyish smile perpetually on the verge of a sulk.”

• “It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.”

• “Trim abundance… a few repetitive houses” (suburbs).

• “She can tell by his voice that he is claiming her… He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness.”

• “The sort of card you send to an acquaintance whose tastes you cannot guess.”

• “The memory of him in the daily and ordinary world was in retreat.”

• “The smell did not make Grace hungry, exactly - it made her remember being hungry in other circumstances.”

• “Her casually provocative outfits.”

• “Everything might still be cheerful but the cheerfulness was hard as knives” (a couple, after drinking).

• “A bachelor’s room, with everything deliberate and necessary proclaiming a certain austere satisfaction.”

• “The conversation of kisses.”

• “Sporadic and secret, but, on the whole, comforting” (someone’s sex life). show less

I need to study this book. It's so beautiful and so compelling! The writing drew me in so subtly and sweetly that I didn't see the emotional precipice until I had fallen into it. Each story made the pain of the fall and landing totally worthwhile. I don't know how Ms. Munro did this, over and over, hence why this very much requires re-reading and study on my part. I have every intention of reading Ms. Munro's entire bibliography.