Argobot

The Idle Book Club 18: Runaway

Recommended Posts

Is this a novel or a short story collection?

Munro only does short stories.

Finished the book, it's good as any of her other stuff.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Munro only does short stories.

Finished the book, it's good as any of her other stuff.

Ah, I haven't read anything from her.  So I guess I am in for something new.  I haven't read a short story collection in a few years so this should be a nice change of pace.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Haha, I picked this book in part because of Franzen's review.

Munro's short stories are often connected implicitly or explicitly. Viewing them that way helps me get through the sometimes jarring nature of reading short stories.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm having  the same sort of experience Sarah described when reading Man In the High Castle, since I live just outside of Vancouver and recognize a lot of the places mentioned in this book. She even name-drops my town! I'm relevant!

 

I'm about halfway through right now and I am once again absolutely flabbergasted by Alice Munro. I read another one of her collections last year but it was in the middle of some weird times so I can't really remember it. She is so charming and effective in such an indescribable way; I am having trouble putting into words why I enjoy her writing so much. I have a particular soft spot for stories about family, which most of her stories are, so that probably helps, and her characters are so understandable and realistic that it immediately pulls me in.

 

I guess I have nothing particularly important to say other than wow I love this book! 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Alice Munro’s stories have a very peculiar, particular quality. I feel like I could identify one of her stories quite easily, if it appeared in a collection with her name removed. Yet at the same time, I find it difficult to distinguish between her works in my mind. I’ve read one or two of her books prior to this one, and I’ve certainly read her stories in other publications like the New Yorker or the Guardian; but I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I don’t think I could actually name one of her stories off the top of my head, or give a description of what happens in it. Maybe this is just me with a poor memory for such things, but I think it’s also that her stories tend to exude such a powerfully specific sense of place. For me, coming from a place like London, small-town Canada seems awfully distant and strange; add to this her tendency to be sometimes nonspecific about time, and you have a tendency for these tales to feel like they exist in a world of their own. 

 

Another thing that adds to my sense of these stories as being somehow non-specific is that they’re difficult to describe. You couldn’t reduce them down to an elevator pitch, or if you did, you’d lose what it is about them that makes them interesting. The author’s prose has a kind of snowballing effect: the gradual accumulation of characterful details that at first seem kind of disconnected, almost meaningless, until the weight of all this observation attains its own momentum and careers through the story under its own energy. The stories are not without tension and drama, of course, but I always feel as a reader that Munro has everything absolutely under control. There’s something quietly commanding about her writing, as she were always taking the long view and the wider context over the short-term thrill of sensation.   

I like this quote from ‘Passion’, from when Grace is talking to Mrs Travers: 

 

‘…For instance she said, about Anna Karenina, ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but I know that first I identified with Kitty, and then it was Anna — oh, it was awful, with Anna, and now, you know, the last time I found myself sympathizing all the time with Dolly. Dolly when she goes to the country, you know, with all those children, and she has to figure out how to do the washing, there’s the problem about the washtubs — I suppose that’s just how your sympathies changes as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs…’

 

I wonder if there’s a little bit of metafictional self-commentary here: after all, what are Munro’s stories if not a charting of this same course in human affairs? First you have the passion of youth, then the tragedy of personal disappointment, then the later years when domestic concerns overwhelm past idealism. There’s something sad about this, of course — and there’s something sad about all of these stories — but they aren’t depressing, nor are they pessimistic. Very few people here are totally beyond redemption, although someone like the beatnik journalist Harry in ‘Trespasses’ comes pretty close. There’s more than a little veiled contempt in a line like: ‘…He couldn’t stand the idea of all the domestic chaos. He had his writing to do. He wanted to achieve things, so he couldn’t have chaos…’

 

There’s a recurring theme here of troubled or doomed relationships between men and women, one which we might relate back to Oyeyemi’s treatment of gendered violence in ‘Mr Fox’. Munro’s female protagonists are for the most part quite stable and sensible women, but there are very few men here who are stable, trustworthy and untroubled. There’s the brutally possessive Clark in ‘Runaway’, the suicidal man on the train in ‘Chance’ (and also Eric, who we later find is not without flaws either), Neil the alcoholic doctor in ‘Passion’, Danilo and his brother in ‘Tricks’, and Ollie in ‘Powers’. In fact, at one point Ollie is described by Nancy in a way which is quite helpful in this regard (my bold):

 

‘…Ollie is certainly not a bad person but he has an effect — and now I think of it, not just on women but on men too — and it is not that he does not know about this but that he does not exactly take responsibility for it. To put it frankly, I cannot think of any worse fate than falling in love with him…’

 

It’s not so much that the men in the stories collected here are ‘bad people’, but they all have a tendency (deliberate or otherwise) to effect women in profound and life-altering ways. And Nancy’s follow-up sentence is the crucial one: they do not take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. I’m sure somebody could write an essay about the anti-patriarchal impulse within this collection, but even without going that far, it doesn’t seem like a controversial statement to suggest that Munro's essential position is that on the whole, women’s lives tend to be shaped in a large part by the actions and decisions of men. 

 

If we were to reduce this to a basic structure, it’s not so different from the moral of ‘Mr Fox’ — that men effect gendered violence against women in ways both physical and emotional — but Munro adds so much more in terms of context and human experience to this picture. It’s exactly what she is talking about in that quote that Franzen excerpts in the introduction here: ‘The complexity of things — the things within things — just seems to be endless…I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.’

Here’s a link to ‘I and the Village’ by Marc Chagall. One for the shopgirls everywhere.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That's a great post, marginalgloss. I can totally relate to being unable to remember her stories very well soon after, which I always attributed to my poor memory, but it might just be because the plots are secondary to the overall mood / character feelings of the stories. Although, having said that, I think I will remember this collection more than the other one I read (I believe it was Dear Life?) - a few of these stories particularly struck me on my first reading: namely, 'Passion', 'Trespasses', and 'Tricks'. 

 

It's also super interesting that the settings felt homey and and familiar to me, while "awfully distant and strange" to you. I think that says something about how well she is able to capture her environment. I've certainly read stories set in far-away places that felt comfortable to me, like they could have been set almost anywhere, so it's a testament to Munro that she is able to give her stories the feeling of a specific location with such skill. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hard to characterize my reaction to Munro because it's more of a non-reaction than anything. Yes, her stories are carefully crafted. Yes, they're amongst the best exemplars of the coiled, latent violence in how men often regard and handle and control women. Yes, I can see how the Nobel Prize committee would dig her.

But at the same time, I don't really get anything out of them. The plotting is pretty insubstantial and just there to set up character moments. She'll sometimes play around with an epistolary mode, but variations in style are only ever like 5% at most. She gets a lot of praise because the characters are richly developed, even compared to novels, but there's a certain joy in the best novels of seeing something develop over time, or see a character end up in a radically different position than they started without any discrete fulcrum point. The very form of short stories, even in Munro's hands, collapses those possibilities down to where she can only really hint at those developments in backstory.

[some of this probably reads as problems I have with the very existence of short stories, which is partially true! The form is a fucking weird place where there's almost no commercial success but, due to their shortness, they're perfect for studying and cooing over in academic or workshop contexts, their production artificially boosted by MFA programs nationwide. But more specifically, my favorite short stories are all, well, shorter. These fifty-page efforts aren't short enough to feel compressed or pointed, but not long enough to have those sort of novel-y parts I crave.

Munro's just this awkward middle-ground of—I'll say again—extremely well-crafted short stories. They're incredibly controlled, giving every impression of being doted over with the vigilance and standards of someone who's been doing this for an entire career. But they're all just sameishness. The sample-size is small enough that I'm hesitant to use these stories to come to any conclusion about Munro's larger project, but I can't say that I'm a fan of this collection.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Oh man, I had no idea that you guys were doing Runaway until my podcast feed updated! I love me some Alice Munro, but have never read this one (despite hearing that it might be her best). Got it on hold at the library now!

 

Gregbrown, I know where you're coming from in terms of short stories being a weird format. If you want to give Munro another shot, I recommend either Lives of Girls and Women or Who Do You Think You Are? Both are short story collections that follow a single character, so they feel like a cross between a short story and a novel. They might give you more of the development and change that you're looking for. I think the former is more consistent throughout, but the latter has some freaking great stories. Wild Swans in particular.

 

Here's a question that struck me as I was thinking about Munro this morning: why don't people talk about her more often? Even in Canada, even in discussions about women authors, she always seems like an afterthought. Like "Oh, yeah, Alice Munro is great. But we're going to talk about Margaret Atwood or Margaret Laurence". Yet I would argue (and the Nobel committee seems to agree) that Munro is Canada's best writer and one of the world's greatest living writers. Is it because short stories aren't as popular a genre (although as gregbrown says, their certainly popular in academic circles)? Is it because her work isn't overtly provocative or political? 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I love them as snapshots of time, but all the same each one seems to live squarely in the center of "waiting for the other shoe to drop" and it makes me anxious since, like Greg mentioned, the format sort of restricts the stories to just that space.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So I finally finished this book and listened to the episode! Gerat job Chris and Sarah, I really enjoyed that discussion. I have so many thoughts, I had to take notes, but now I've lost them so I hope I get to everything I wanted to say.

 

First off, I loved this book. I think it might be my favourite of the four Munro books I've read, or maybe tied for first with Lives of Girls and Women. Speaking of which, I think that book's in need of a bit of defense. Sarah said on the podacst that it's the least well-regarded of Munro's books , which for all I know is true, but it's still really good. I believe it was the book that first made her famous. Sarah says that maybe it doesn't work as well because it's a novel, but I think calling Lives of Girls and Women a novel is misrepresentative. Yes, every story follows one character through her youth in one small town, but they don't feel like chapters in a novel, they feel like short stories. That is, there's not really an arc or throughline between them, other than what the reader can infer. The stories have their own rhythm and don't necessarily follow from each other, similar to the Juliet stories in Runaway. Anyway, it's really good and well worth reading, especially for lovers of Munro.

 

I was surprised to hear Chris say that he didn't think of these stories as particularly being about women, or at least that it wasn't the first thing that came to mind for him. Perhaps it's because I first read Munro in university and we talked a lot about the gender dynamics of her stories, but I see gender everywhere in these stories. It's not only that they all focus on women, but that they all focus on aspects of those women's lives that are heavily linked to gender: marriage, romance, childbirth, parenthood. None of these stories would be at all the same if the protagonists weren't women, which the possible exception of "Trespasses", although even there, the scenes between Lauren and Delphine would probably be very different if Lauren weren't a girl. However, they do feel more like stories "about people" than "about women"  and I think that's one of their strengths and maybe what Chris was getting at when he said they felt universal. As a man reading these stories, I don't think "oh man, these characters have experiences completely different to mine." Instead, I'm struck by how relatable they are - the feeling of being a child with a cool adult friend, or having an entrancing first encounter with somebody that you don't want to end, or the tension in the room when you know your parents are going to fight. These are all things I've felt and seeing them be described through the eyes of women - who also are going through all sorts of things that I can't precisely relate to - makes those characters deeper and more real.

 

This relates, I think, about what both of you were saying about all these stories and characters being very similar and yet each one still feeling fresh and revealing. Because while Munro goes back to a lot of the same ideas - smart quiet girls, overconfident men, romance that's at best quietly satisfactory - each story also has something description that rings true outside of what might be seen as the "main" action. "Passion," for instance, really captures the feeling of magical summers in rich rural Ontario, after dinner family games and nights by the water. "Trespasses" describes the feeling of watching your parents about to fight and not knowing what to do about it better than anything I've ever read. These variations stop the stories from feeling rote or predictable.

 

Also, while I think it's true that Munro's protagonist's are all very similar, one thing I like is the variety of ages she puts them in. In this collection, I think we see women in every decade of their lives, up to I guess their seventies or eighties. That's another thing that I think that creates variation between them. 

 

On the thing about the trees: I have a lot of family that grew up in mid-century, small town Ontario and they can definitely point out all sorts of trees. It's totally a thing.

 

I think it's funny that my favourite stories - "Silence" and "Tricks" - seemed to correspond with your least favourites. "Tricks" I liked because I'm a sucker for those "Before Sunrise" type stories of people meeting and having fleeting romances and having that wrapped in the concept of yearly visits to the Stratford Festival really resonated with me. Also, that ending was really surprising, because Munro doesn't usually end stories like that. It was as though O'Henry dropped in to ghostwrite it. But having that sort of twist in a story that was also full of Munro's trademark descriptions and relationships and quiet melancholy felt really refreshing. 

 

"Silence" I loved because I've read few stories that have provoked such a visceral emotional reaction in me. The idea of a child just completing abandoning their parent like that is completely unfathomable to me. Of course I understand people leaving abusive or unhealthy situations with their families and I would never say they shouldn't do that. But nothing like that seemed to be happening between Juliet and Penelope. Penelope just seemed like she had gotten tired of her mother and left, without a word. She instantly became one of my most hated characters in all of fiction, even though she never showed up. I can't imagine the pain that would cause my parents if I did that, and for Juliet to have such a seemingly mild reaction to it confused the hell out of me. That confusion created an utter fascination in me, analyzing why I had that reaction and why, according to Munro apparently, other people have such different relationships with their families. I loved the story for that.

 

I think those two stories also showcased Munro's greatest skill as a writer: her ability to imbue her stories with sadness without having her characters be particularly sad themselves. At the end of "Tricks" Robin is shocked and confused, but she doesn't then think about how her life has terrible because of this dumb mistake, she just thinks to herself jokingly that she should have worn the other dress. Her life has, by all accounts, been fairly decent. Likewise, Juliet just accepts that her daughter has left and goes on living. Neither of these characters is particularly happy, but their lives have small pleasures and they've learned to incorporate the sadness they experienced into the fabric of their lives without being overwhelmed by it. Munro's stories always remind me that everybody has everybody lives through tragedy but few people's lives are, on the whole, tragic.

 

Sorry, that was a lot of rambling. Like I said, I lost my notes.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not sure how many people are aware of this but Pedro Almovodar's latest film, Julieta, has just recently began its international release. It's a Spanish adaptation of the stories Chance, Soon and Silence. The ones revolving around the character Juliet. Is this out near anyone else? If anyone has seen it, what did y'all think?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Two years late to this, but I finally got around to reading this and am so glad I did.

 

This is the only Munro collection I've read and hearing that the character of the young woman who is smarter than her circumstances want her to be is a common one for Munro is interesting considering that this collection starts off with a story about a woman who very much isn't that. Carla comes off as timid and pliable in a way that none of the other main characters do (except for maybe the child in "Trespasses"), but the story still manages to convey the same theme of a woman who wants to escape the life she's in. What was really striking to me though (especially as I went through the rest of the book) was that while tragedy intersected a lot in these women's lives, the ending to "Runaway" is sinister in its implications that women are punished for that desire to be free. (I love the writing in those last few paragraphs of the story and the way it invoked a horror movie in my mind.)

 

I have so much more inside me that I want to say about this book: the way it reminds me of early Springsteen albums or that I've been listening a lot to Lorde's "Melodrama" and can't help but find parallels, or the subtle way that class takes a role in some of the stories and define the characters. But I think mentioning that the collection made me want to contextualize it with other art I've experienced and also personal events I've gone through is a clear indicator that it really made an impact on me. What a wonderful book.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now