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A review by savaging
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro
4.0
So pleased about my first dip into Munro.
The title essay wasn't my favorite, since the plot seemed a little cliche -- but it set up a warning about the character of the writer. Especially the woman-writer. This character is "sly," she speaks far beyond her competence, she is always taking risks with the lives of others. When there is a writer in a Munro story, she'll probably be making mistakes. She's astonished with her own audacity and worried she's about to get her come-uppance. She doubts herself like the narrator of "Family Furnishings":
"There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting -- set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble."
I loved these stories, even as I sometimes wondered if they weren't all in fact one single story. So many of them repeat the formulation: working-class woman marries a man with more power who spends his time trying to assert his superiority to her in some way, to lord over or control her. Woman finds some way to escape, even if it's only internally. Maybe this repetition is a peculiarity of this collection, or maybe it's the only way for a storyteller to make the leap into asserting these problems are shared by an entire class of people -- to make a political argument out of personal stories.
The title essay wasn't my favorite, since the plot seemed a little cliche -- but it set up a warning about the character of the writer. Especially the woman-writer. This character is "sly," she speaks far beyond her competence, she is always taking risks with the lives of others. When there is a writer in a Munro story, she'll probably be making mistakes. She's astonished with her own audacity and worried she's about to get her come-uppance. She doubts herself like the narrator of "Family Furnishings":
"There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting -- set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble."
I loved these stories, even as I sometimes wondered if they weren't all in fact one single story. So many of them repeat the formulation: working-class woman marries a man with more power who spends his time trying to assert his superiority to her in some way, to lord over or control her. Woman finds some way to escape, even if it's only internally. Maybe this repetition is a peculiarity of this collection, or maybe it's the only way for a storyteller to make the leap into asserting these problems are shared by an entire class of people -- to make a political argument out of personal stories.