Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature in October. The author, 82, lives in Clinton, Ontario and has written 14 short-story collections, including her latest, Dear Life. I am a fiction writer myself, and I was hoping that Philip Roth would win, but that’s because I didn’t even know that Alice Munro was on the short list (I don’t follow the Nobel speculation). If I’d known she was also being considered, I would’ve found it tough to choose, as Roth and Munro are two of my favorite living authors.
Ever since I discovered Munro in the eighties, I’ve returned again and again to her story collections for only one reason: satisfaction. Ms. Munro’s short stories are often compared to Chekov’s, because they share a certain wry wisdom that comes from an unsparing inspection of the human psyche,which is nevertheless devoid of judgment. Her stories grip the reader with a full-blown intensity normally associated with novels. I can remember early on experiencing the catharsis peculiar to great literature and wondering how in hell’s name she managed to take me that far down into the human heart in comparatively so few pages. Flannery O’Connor approaches it and is wondrous grand, but her work tends to be more allegorical—she is standing farther back. Henry James could do it in his “nouvelles;” Kafka was economical too, but Munro achieves the same effect in fewer pages still.
Around the same time the Nobel Prizes were announced, an interesting piece appeared in The New York Times about a recently published study that shows a spike in emotional intelligence after reading literary fiction. Well, if you want to approach brilliance, at least for a little while, read Alice Munro. You will be able to freely access a deeper, broader insight into our unique condition, almost too complex to be understood, except by the rare genius of the likes of this author.
Perhaps Ms. Munro’sstrange depth of focus has been abetted by a lack of distractions. By that I mean, she has spent most of her life in remote Ontario, where class differences, changing mores, and how people behave (“Badly and it’s a shame” as Chekov once put it) could be observed in clear relief against the stark, monolithic background of rural Canada. For me, this lends an exotic note to the otherwise universality of her work. Sadly, because she’s a woman (the 13th woman to win the Nobel), it is still true that I must make a point of emphasizing her complete lack of sentimentality. If you doubt my claim, read, for instance, her classic short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, adapted for the movies (starring Julie Christie in one of her greatest roles), which was just reissued in the New Yorkera few weeks ago after Munro won the Nobel. In fact, any exposure to her work will remind you that sentimentality is the enemy of truth. The rigorous beauty of Alice Munro’s prose and the courage of her observations are why I read literary fiction—and why I need it to live an examined life.
