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A review by nealadolph
The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
4.0
Let the record show, as it does, that I started reading this collection back in the beginning of February 2015. Let it also show that I barely managed to finish it in time to tuck it into my 2015 reading list. This is how I read Alice Munro, because I suspect that this is the only way my brain and heart can heal itself after most of her stories.
I recall when Munro won her Nobel Prize that many people wondered why she deserved it. There is nothing exceptional about her writing, except that it is always exceptionally good. She doesn't experiment with syntax or shape, though her shape and syntax is always too precise to be anything other than the production of a great many experiments. There is no moral urgency to her stories, except that her stories are about the quotidien and the urgencies that we bypass in our sunrise to sunset lives.
Sometimes I wonder, while reading one or two of her stories, or while sitting between the stories and reading something else, if maybe they were right. But each time I conclude, out of necessity, that they are wrong.
I have strong feelings about her, I suppose. Her writing is beautiful, her pacing is perfection, her shape and format of her stories are remarkably well tuned, her characters sound and feel alive and present and burdened. She has a deeply moral sense of the world, of justice, and resilience, and of resignation. Every story has a turn of phrase, at least one and often more, that is undeniably perfect, which cuts to the bone and a little deeper, hits the heart, and goes deeper because it is filled with a sadness that aches as though it depresses and moves the body through space - a sadness and reality that is, somehow, the very motivational discovery of humanity.
And this is the reality that I find when reading Munro - every now and then you read a story like "Accident" or "Labor Day Dinner" or "The Turkey Season" which are quite good, much better than most other stories you read from most any other writer, the kind of works that are masterful in many technical ways and which will keep you up at night as you race through hoping to finish before sleep once again claims you. Sometimes there is the occasional story that doesn't ring with the same kind of presence as most Munrovian works, like "Prue", but which is itself good enough to be published in The New Yorker (because even a bad Munro story is as good as most anybody else can hope for). And then sometimes, and it happens often, the truly masterful pops up and you feel as though Munro is shaping and revealing her knowledge of human nature. "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd", "The Moons of Jupiter", "Dulse", "Hard-Luck Stories", "Visitors".
My admiration for her work only grows as I read more. Now that I'm done this one and am reading a short-story collection by some other writer (one who is also very highly regarded for her accomplishments with the form) I can't help but feel a sense of disappointment. The writing isn't as precise, the characters seem more like caricatures, the stories are the kind of thing you'd give to a high school student to enjoy and tease out some superficial moral. But maybe I'm just in withdrawal and I'm craving something written by the master of the form.
I recall when Munro won her Nobel Prize that many people wondered why she deserved it. There is nothing exceptional about her writing, except that it is always exceptionally good. She doesn't experiment with syntax or shape, though her shape and syntax is always too precise to be anything other than the production of a great many experiments. There is no moral urgency to her stories, except that her stories are about the quotidien and the urgencies that we bypass in our sunrise to sunset lives.
Sometimes I wonder, while reading one or two of her stories, or while sitting between the stories and reading something else, if maybe they were right. But each time I conclude, out of necessity, that they are wrong.
I have strong feelings about her, I suppose. Her writing is beautiful, her pacing is perfection, her shape and format of her stories are remarkably well tuned, her characters sound and feel alive and present and burdened. She has a deeply moral sense of the world, of justice, and resilience, and of resignation. Every story has a turn of phrase, at least one and often more, that is undeniably perfect, which cuts to the bone and a little deeper, hits the heart, and goes deeper because it is filled with a sadness that aches as though it depresses and moves the body through space - a sadness and reality that is, somehow, the very motivational discovery of humanity.
And this is the reality that I find when reading Munro - every now and then you read a story like "Accident" or "Labor Day Dinner" or "The Turkey Season" which are quite good, much better than most other stories you read from most any other writer, the kind of works that are masterful in many technical ways and which will keep you up at night as you race through hoping to finish before sleep once again claims you. Sometimes there is the occasional story that doesn't ring with the same kind of presence as most Munrovian works, like "Prue", but which is itself good enough to be published in The New Yorker (because even a bad Munro story is as good as most anybody else can hope for). And then sometimes, and it happens often, the truly masterful pops up and you feel as though Munro is shaping and revealing her knowledge of human nature. "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd", "The Moons of Jupiter", "Dulse", "Hard-Luck Stories", "Visitors".
My admiration for her work only grows as I read more. Now that I'm done this one and am reading a short-story collection by some other writer (one who is also very highly regarded for her accomplishments with the form) I can't help but feel a sense of disappointment. The writing isn't as precise, the characters seem more like caricatures, the stories are the kind of thing you'd give to a high school student to enjoy and tease out some superficial moral. But maybe I'm just in withdrawal and I'm craving something written by the master of the form.