Alice Munro's Best Read Free

with secondary characters who despise art and artifice, and any kind of pretentiousness or showing off. It’s against these attitudes and the self-mistrust they inspire that her central characters must struggle in order to free themselves enough to create anything at all.
    At the same time her writer protagonists share this scorn of the artificial side of art, and the distrust of it. What should be written about? How should one write? How much of art is genuine, how much just a bag of cheap tricks—imitating people, manipulating their emotions, making faces? How can one affirm anything about another person—even a made-up person—without presumption? Above all, how should a story end? (Munro often provides one ending, then questions or revises it. Or else she simply distrusts it, as in the final paragraph of “Meneseteung” where the narrator says, “I may have got it wrong.”) Isn’t the very act of writing an act of arrogance, isn’t the pen a broken reed? A number of stories—“Friend of My Youth,” “Carried Away,” “Wilderness Station,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”—contain letters that display the vanity or falsity or even the malice of their writers. If the writing of letters can be so devious, what about writing itself?
    This tension has remained with her: as in “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro’s artistic characters are punished for not succeeding, but they are punished also for success. The woman writer, thinking about her father, says:
    I could hear him saying, Well, I didn’t see anything about you in
Maclean’s.
And if he had read something about me, he would say, Well, I didn’t think too much of that write-up. His tone would be humorous andindulgent but would produce in me a familiar dreariness of spirit. The message I got from him was simple: Fame must be striven for, then apologized for. Getting or not getting it, you will be to blame.

    â€œDreariness of spirit” is one of the great Munro enemies. Her characters do battle with it in every way they can, fighting against stifling mores and other people’s deadening expectations and imposed rules of behaviour, and every possible kind of muffling and spiritual smothering. Given a choice between being a person who does good works but has inauthentic feelings and is numb at heart and one who behaves badly but is true to what she really feels and is thus alive to herself, a Munro woman is likely to choose the latter; or, if she chooses the former, she will then comment on her own slipperiness, guile, wiliness, slyness, and perversity. Honesty, in Munro’s work, is not the best policy: it is not a policy at all, but an essential element, like air. The characters must get hold of at least some of it, by fair means or foul, or—they feel—they will go under.
    The battle for authenticity is waged most significantly in the field of sex. The Munro social world—like most societies in which silence and secrecy are the norm in sexual matters—carries a high erotic charge, and this charge extends like a neon penumbra around each character, illuminating landscapes, rooms, and objects. A rumpled bed says more, in the hands of Munro, than any graphic in-out, in-out depiction of genitalia ever could. Even if a story is not primarily about a love affair or sexual encounter, men and women are always aware of one another as men and women, positively or negatively, recognizing sexual attraction and curiosity or else sexual revulsion. Women are immediately attuned to the sexual power of other women, and are wary of it, or envious. Men show off and preen and flirt and seduce and compete.
    Munro’s characters are as alert as dogs in a perfume store to the sexual chemistry in a gathering—the chemistry among others, as well as that of their own visceral responses. Falling in love, falling in lust, sneaking around on