Cynthia Ozick calls Alice Munro “our Chekhov”, and I couldn’t agree more. Not only am I amazed that she hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet, I’m amazed that hordes of dazzled, appreciative readers haven’t gathered in the Ontario countryside, woven their own Nobel Prize out of roots and branches, and presented it to her door. It’s a deep pleasure to come across a collection of Munro stories that you haven’t read yet, as I did last week with The Progress of Love, first published in 1986.

There’s one fascinating element I find myself noticing in these stories—and now that I look, in other Munro stories as well. It’s just one facet of her talent (and I’m sure there are PhD theses on it) but worth noting nonetheless.

Munro has a persistent challenge: how to keep characters so believably, supremely ordinary, while at the same time giving them a depth of insight worthy of short stories? She has a masterful solution. Her characters don’t own their profundity. They’re just borrowing it.

She has her own, very loose, way of connecting her characters to their emotions. The language, pointedly, never draws them in sharp relief against their setting. While she gives them interior attributes, those attributes don’t really “belong” to them, in the sense of making them special. It’s more like, during the circumstances of the story, they’re temporarily tapping into a deeper pool. Here’s an example.

Page 86 (“Miles City, Montana”):

I felt a furious and sickening disgust. Children sometimes have an access of disgust concerning adults. The size, the lumpy shapes, the bloated power.

You caught that, didn’t you? Children sometimes have an access of disgust concerning adults. The narrator makes an “I” statement, but she just as quickly steps back from the spotlight. She’s describing a time when she was six years old, watching her parents at a funeral. It was a deep and important feeling, central to the story as a matter of fact, but it didn’t make her special. Children sometimes have an access of disgust, etc. This sort of thing happens.

Another writer would have made the narrator a regular little Scout Finch, holding up her insight as a means of setting her apart, making her unusual and therefore interesting:

Even at the tender age of six, I was capable of finding myself not enthralled by grownups, but disgusted by them.

Or something like that.

Munro finds a way to make the disgust powerful, profound, and yet still ordinary. She does not even say Children are often disgusted by adults. She says Children sometimes have an access of disgust,  a brilliant choice of words that bypasses the whole question of ownership.

The phrase an access of disgust implies that children don’t create this feeling; they just wander into it, like an unlocked room. It’s strange to experience, maybe even dangerous. It doesn’t belong to any child, and it certainly doesn’t belong to the child that the narrator used to be.

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02.16.09 § 0