![]() ![]() “Fiction” contains some wonderful humor that I didn’t miss. I’m reminded of Henry James protesting that The Turn of the Screw was merely an entertainment, negating the volumes of psychobabble written about the novel. ![]() The story “Fiction,” my favorite in this exemplary collection, deals with the question of what is fact and what is fiction, and does a writer really know where a story comes from? Or, for that matter, what a story is really about. It did not look like blood at all, but like the stuff you skim off from strawberries when you’re making jam.” The language is striking: “A trickle of pink foam came out from under the boy’s head, near the ear. She returns to reality literally with a crash, when she happens on an accident scene, and takes control of her own life by saving the life of a young accident victim. She listens to his manipulative ramblings and is tempted to accept his babble of other dimensions. Still, Doree visits him, unable to break the control he wielded over her. In the opening story “Dimensions,” Doree’s husband is in an institution for the criminally insane, having committed an unspeakable crime. She no longer has secret knowledge, and feels a terrible disappointment. Years later, wanting to brush up on those details, she thinks of the encyclopedia, but ends up on the internet where every imaginable fact about Tristan da Cunha is displayed. When her son was young they scoured books for information on obscure and isolated islands like Tristan da Cunha. Here Munro comments on the difficulty of possessing specialized knowledge and how this era of the internet diminishes that knowledge. The boy becomes a strange, troubled, possibly insane adult, who disappears for years at a time. In “Deep-Holes,” the character Sally has to deal with a son, who at age 9 falls into a deep hole and is rescued by his father. Reading becomes a compulsion: one has to find out what is going to happen. The language as always is crisp and clear, like the tinkling of bells. The collection is vintage Munro in that many of the stories are novels, covering years and lifetimes, condensed to their tasty essence. ![]() ![]() Her new collection, Too Much Happiness, contains ten delectable stories that are as good as anything she has written in her long career. Her reply was, “Bill, everything is funny.” I said to her after the reading, “It never occurred to me that your story was funny.” The audience laughed heartily at the story Alice read, one I had read in all seriousness. I purchased her book, I believe it was “The Moons of Jupiter,” and thoroughly enjoyed it, but it had not occurred to me that most of the stories contained a lot of humour. I’ll never forget what Alice Munro said to me the first time we met. Too Much Happiness (Douglas Gibson Books / M&S) ![]()
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