A review by bonnieg
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

5.0

Alice Munro is a marvel. She focuses in on very specific subject matter (though she pushes those boundaries more in this collection than any other I have read, especially in the title story). Yet with all the similarities in her work, every story surprises me, and leaves me feeling off kilter. I think its the way she frames stories. Her narratives start at moments that seem like the middle of a story and make you wonder what came before, and then the stories end somewhere utterly different from where you expect them to end. It leaves you feeling like you missed something before and after, and yet each story is absolutely complete. I do not know how she does this, but she always does. I crave that off-kilter feeling. There is a beauty in the way she manages to make you see things from uncomfortable perspectives. Munro brings language to heel and makes it do what she wants to it to do, but her language is not expansive or beautiful. Her language is plain, sometimes rather ugly, sometimes positively vulgar. Yet there are no more perfect words for what she is saying.

Bottom line, another perfect collection, though for me the greatest among equals was [b:Wenlock Edge|16067323|Wenlock Edge|Alice Murno|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|21858954], which is odd and creepy and speaks exquisitely to the ways in which women accept the unacceptable, repress our honest reactions, take the blame for wrongs visited upon us, and lower our standards to recast situations to make even the most repulsive things appear as if they are satisfying to us.