Lives of Girls and Women

Sally Mann, Holding Virginia, 1989, The Art Institute of Chicago

By Alice Munro, New York, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 277

Alice Munro is a masterful writer of short fiction.  This is her only novel and, unsurprisingly, it reads as a series of interrelated tales.  Del Jordan of Jubilee, Ontario is a young woman coming of age in the 1940s.    Its a bildungsroman, the story of how a writer became herself.  Munro's poetry lies in the closely observed details of everyday life in small towns.  She investigates individual subjectivity and shows how social relationships impact the formation of personality.  The net result is a fully developed sense of place.  Her work has a lovely tone of quiet modesty.  

Located on the Canadian frontier, Jubilee was founded in the 19th century and features a town hall, a post office, and a small selection of mostly Protestant churches.  Elegant buildings dot its main street, and flat farm land and snaking rivers surround the town.  Del grows into adolescence and finds herself attracted to a lumberjack, Garnet.  This relationship distracts Del from her studies and she fails to win a university scholarship. Smiley notes that Garnet functions as a pivot: Del escapes conventional expectations, in the form of upward mobility through intellectual achievement, and turns toward her artistic vision.  The world of Huron County in Ontario is Munro's project.  I was appalled by Del's test performance.  All I could think was "Run, Del, run!  You're going to be buried alive in the middle of nowhere!"

Munro's work shows a special sensitivity for the freighted relationships between mothers and daughters. The interactions between Del and her mother are carefully wrought.  The opening sentence of the short story "Friend of My Youth," for instance, is simply brilliant: "I used to dream about my mother, and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same."