Most of us are lucky to get a gold pen when we retire. Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize.
Ian Willms for The New York TimesAlice MunroWriting about the collection “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” in 1974, Frederick Busch said the stories seemed “formulaic,” their tone “sycophantic.” In 1983, forming a much different opinion of “Moons of Jupiter,” Benjamin De Mott wrote, “The freshness of Ms. Munro’s literary performance has little to do with situation, everything to do with character.” He called those characters “shrewd, amused, self-aware,” “risk takers at heart, plucky, independent, sexually vibrant.”
From there it was mostly raves. By 1986, Michiko Kakutani was writing that Ms. Munro “richly deserves recognition as one of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the short story.” Reviewing “Selected Stories” in 1996, John Updike wrote: “As well as a spirited, acutely perceptive tale teller, Ms. Munro is an implacable destiny spinner, whose authorial voice breaks into her fiction like that of a God who can no longer bear to keep quiet.”
Speaking to Sam Tanenhaus on The Book Review’s podcast in 2009, Ms. Munro said: “This does puzzle me a bit, though, there’s a lot of comment about how I write about ordinary people, and the word drabness comes in, too. These are the people I know. . . . None of them seem ordinary to me, because they all want something very much, and they’re capable of quite unexpected things sometimes.”
In his review of “Runaway” in The Times Book Review, Jonathan Franzen famously listed the reasons why Ms. Munro’s “excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.” (“3. She doesn’t give her books grand titles like ‘Canadian Pastoral,’ ‘Canadian Psycho,’ ‘Purple Canada,’ ‘In Canada’ or ‘The Plot Against Canada.’ ”) The fourth reason on that list was her lack of a Nobel, so it needs updating.
“There is a nice feeling about being just like everyone else now,” Ms. Munro told Mr. McGrath about her choice to retire. But even the humble Ms. Munro presumably doesn’t feel just like everyone else this morning.
More reviews of Ms. Munro’s work in The Times:
“Friend of My Youth” (Books of The Times)
“Open Secrets” (Books of The Times)
“Selected Stories” (Book Review)
“The Love of a Good Woman” (Book Review)
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (Books of The Times)
“Runaway” (Books of The Times)
“The View From Castle Rock” (Books of The Times)
“The View From Castle Rock” and “Carried Away” (Book Review)
“Too Much Happiness” (Books of The Times)
“Too Much Happiness” (Book Review)
“Dear Life” (Books of The Times)
“Dear Life” (Book Review)
Features from The Times:
“Alice Munro’s Vancouver” (2006)
“Northern Exposures” (2004)
“Forsaking Her Lair Only in Stories” (1998)
“Canada’s Alice Munro Finds Excitement in Short-Story Form” (1986)
Other sources:
The Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review
Archive of short stories in The New Yorker
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation archives
