The Progress of Love (original 1986; edição 1986)

Excellent. ( )

The Progress of Love - 2
Lichen - 3
Monsieur Les Deux Chapeaux - 2
Miles City, Montana - 4
Fits - 3
The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink - 3
Jesse and Meribeth - 4
Eskimo - 2
A Queer Streak - 4
Circle of Prayer - 3
White Dump - 2 ( )

Alice Munro is an acclaimed writer but I just can't get into her writing. I believe there must be something deeper in her stories but I just can't fathom what it is. ( )

I tried earlier to read this author's first short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, and could find neither content nor style to keep me engaged. This collection was published about 18 years later and shows remarkable leaps to the skills I would hope all Nobel Prize winners in Literature would have. The author constantly shows remarkable insight into her characters and nuances in their situations that most other writers never approach. Have you ever had a situation where a parent or teacher or other key person made remarks to you and others in a group, seemingly not talking to you anymore directly than to the others, but in which you knew unquestionably that the person was relating a message intended specifically for your edification? They knew something you had done or were contemplating doing or had experienced, and they were masking their lecture to you in the form of a general group message. They knew. And they wanted you to know that they knew. But without ever letting anybody else know. The first story in this collection hit me hard in just that way. The author said she knew something significant about me -- in detail -- without ever using my name or town or anything connected to me in that way. Unfortunately, about half-way through the collection, it seemed she was talking intimately to other readers and my level of interest dissipated somewhat. That's okay. I suspect she'll have another message just for me in another collection and I'll be ready to absorb every word. ( )

An upscale steakhouse chain, like Morton's or Capital Grille, will consistently serve you a perfectly cooked steak. That's why you shell out the money to go to a place like that, after all. And consistently cooking a steak perfectly is no mean feat- there are many places, even more expensive and ostensibly better restaurants, that fail to do that. At the end of the day, though, even when it's perfectly cooked, what you're getting is a by-the-numbers steak dinner, that doesn't take any risks or try to innovate. Alice Munro is the upscale chain steakhouse of literature: she writes stories that always have the same feel and often have the same subject matter, and she writes all of them exceedingly well. At the end of the day, though, she's serving you the same fare again and again, and no individual story is likely to stand out. If small town personal drama is something that appeals to you, Munro has enough of that to keep you satiated for months, if not years, but never expect her to surprise you.

The first half of this collection made me think that Munro wrote the same story over and over. All the stories featured a small-town Canadian, usually a slightly-past-middle-aged woman, experiences something that sparks a memory of personal hardships in her past. That memory becomes the conduit for the actual content of the story, the narrative only returning to the present (where nothing happens) at the end of the short tale. The second half featured stories that broke this formula, but that still always centered on small-town Canada dealing with low-key personal drama. Elements like a white haired woman and a man working as a mechanic recur, the same tone is present in every story, and the narrative voice is exactly the same despite the narrators ostensibly having different lives. Thus the second half of this collection revealed that while Munro's stories aren't always formulaic in terms of content, they still always (at least in this collection) feel the same. Writing this review only a week or so after finishing the collection, the individual stories have already begun to blend together in my mind.

I get why people like Munro, she writes well (although I didn't find many passages particularly striking) and she writes with consistency. If you like her shtick then I can see her being an author you revisit on a regular basis, because you know what you're going to get and you know you're going to like it. At the end of the day, though, I can't help but find her boring. No matter what hardship her characters are dealing with- slow brother, cheating spouse, disliked father, otherwise unideal childhood- the stories all read the same, and none of the narrative voices are distinguishable. I can't imagine reading through fifteen collections worth of this same basic story being rehashed, I don't think my brain could handle that much sameness. I don't love Flannery O'Connor, but her stories have variety, and they aren't all passive. I found myself hungering for a Flannery O'Connor story in the midst of reading Munro. If you like Alice Munro that's perfectly fine, I can understand that, I just don't happen to find the particular subject matter Munro always focuses on to be particularly compelling. If Alice Munro is your absolute favorite author, though, then I'd really encourage you to take more risks when you select what books you read going forward- there's more to eat out there than steak. ( )