October 11, 2013

Alice Munro, Our Chekhov

Posted by James Wood
The announcement that this years Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and
writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called our
Chekhov. All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are our Chekhov. But Alice Munro really is
our Chekhovwhich is to say, the English languages Chekhov. (In Munros great story, The Beggar Maid, an ambitious man
sees that a friend of the woman he is courting mispronounced Metternich, and says indignantly to her: How can you be
friends with people like that? Im put in mind of Chekhovs story The Russian Master, which has a character who repeatedly
torments a young teacher by asking him why he has never read Lessing.)
Yet many of Munros readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee
seemed to like; I had decided that she would join the list of noble non-Nobelists, a distinguished category that includes Tolstoy,
Nabokov, Borges, Hrabal, Sebald, Bernhard, Ingmar Bergmanand Chekhov, as it happens.
We were wrong, and for once it was wonderful to be wrong. Greatly enjoying being wrong, I spent an hour yesterday rereading
one of Munros finest stories, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which appeared in this magazine. It tells the story of Grant
and Fiona, who have been married for many years. Grant has been a professor, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature,
Fiona a hospital administrator. In their old age, Fiona begins to develop signs of serious dementia, and Grant has her placed in a
local nursing home, Meadowlake. The marriage has been a happy one, or so Grant feels, despite the fact that he has been a
considerable philanderer: He had never stopped making love to Fiona in spite of disturbing demands elsewhere. He had not
stayed away from her for a single night. And just as he has been, in his way, devoted to his wife, so Fiona never strayed from
him. It was never, despite Grants many infidelities, an open marriage. She put up with his adventures.
On the morning of his first visit to the nursing home, after a months separation from Fiona, Grant is full of a solemn tingling,
as in the old days on the morning of his first planned meeting with a new woman. Fiona has not quite forgotten Grant (this is
his great anxiety), but she has found a new friend in the nursing home, a man of about Grants age, named Aubrey, wonderfully
described as having something of the beauty of a powerful, discouraged, elderly horse. But where Fiona was concerned, he was
not discouraged. Grant is naturally jealous, but his love for Fiona is protective, and over the next weeks he begins to adapt to
the new happiness that Fiona has clearly found with Aubrey: He didnt see much point in mentioning their marriage, now.
When Aubreywho was only a temporary residentleaves the nursing home to return to life with his younger wife, Fiona is
distraught, and Grant decides that he will ask Marian, Aubreys wife, if she might occasionally let Aubrey visit Fiona. Marian
refuses: she doesnt want to upset her bewildered husband. He belongs at home, she says, with her. She says that it was probably
a mistake to have put him in the nursing home, even briefly. Grant returns home empty-handed, but he finds a phone message
from Marian: Would he like to go with her to a dance in town at the Legion supposed to be for singles on Saturday night. I
realize youre not a single and I dont mean it that way. Im not either, but it doesnt hurt to get out once in a while. The old
philanderer is interestedpartly because a seducer has never retired from the game, but largely because he thinks that this may
be the best way to get Marian to let Aubrey visit Fiona in the nursing home. Perhaps Marian will be inclined, once the affair is
properly blossoming, to send her husband back there for good?
The story is beautiful in the irony of its symmetriesthe philanderer who unexpectedly loses his loyal wife to the love of
another man, and then returns to his old erotic ways in order to secure his wifes own continuing infidelity. But two additional
elements, both characteristic of Munros careful art, make it a great story. First, there is Munros astounding lack of
sentimentalitythe clear-eyed, utterly unillusioned, bleakly subtle description of the nursing home, its inmates, and its staff.
Grant, for instance, becomes reliant on one of the nurses, who has her own problemsan absent husband, four children, one of
whom is asthmatic. To her, Grant and Fiona and Aubrey too must seem lucky. They had got through life without too much
going wrong. What they had to suffer now that they were old hardly counted. The second very Munro-ish element is the formal
freedom of the story, which compacts a lot of life into a short space, and moves backwards and forwards over a great deal of
terrain. Strikingly, the story begins with two paragraphs, subsequently abandoned, about Fiona and Grant as young people,
before they were even married, and then vaults silently over fifty years to begin the narrative of Fionas elderly mental decline.
These two first paragraphs are beautifully full of energy and joy and hope; they capture with extraordinary economy the
happiness of youth, a happiness largely absent from the rest of the story. This is how The Bear Came Over the Mountain
begins:
Fiona lived in her parents house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that
seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her
mother was Icelandica powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant left-wing politics. The father was an
important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with
an absentminded smile. All kinds of people, rich or shabby-looking, delivered these tirades, and kept coming and going and
arguing and conferring, sometimes in foreign accents. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she
wasnt in a sorority, and this activity in her house was probably the reason.
Because of this sparkling first paragraph, we begin The Bear Came Over the Mountain thinking that it will be a story about a
young womans growth, rather than the tale of her decline (albeit a decline that includes a final unexpected love affair). We carry
with us, through the sadness of aging and loss, the memory of these devastating opening linesdevastating just because they are
not continued, but simply abandoned by Munro at the very start of her tale. The effect is as if Michael Hanekes film Amour
were to open with a scene in which we see the two elderly protagonists as young unmarried lovers, and then brutally scroll
forward five decades.
Throughout her work, Munro is daring in this waydaring with the truth, and daring in her formal choices. At the level of the
sentence, her stories proceed within the grammar of conventional realism; but at the formal level, her work invents its own
grammar, which is why her stories strike many readers as closer to novellas than to any idea of the conventional well-made
short story. And notice, too, in that opening passage, how gently funny and slyly indirect Munro is: the impressive cardiologist
who is subservient at home, happy to listen to strange tirades with an absent-minded smile; a household that is mysteriously
full of different people, coming and going, all of them delivering tirades of one kind or another; and a household that is
perhaps more fun to belong to than a sorority. Such life!