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Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice Munro’s “Haven” was originally published in the March 5, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I’m late getting this posted because I kept hoping to have a moment to read the story this week, and then just post here when that was done. As you can see, that time has yet to materialize. I can’t wait to read this, though, as it’s always an event when we get a new Munro story (which, these days, are coming rather frequently, despite her saying a few years ago that she was done).
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice Munro “Leaving Maverley” was originally published in the November 28, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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Even in retirement, Alice Munro remains prolific. This is her third short story to appear in The New Yorker this year. If we throw in October 2010, it is her fourth in a short time. Before that, her most recent story in the magazine was December of 2008, a year when she publisehd four in the magazine.
One thing I enjoy about Munro’s stories is how detailed she can be while covering a vast amount of time in a short space. “Leaving Maverley” was no exception. The story begins with a fairly detailed column about an old movie theater named the Capital, “as such theatres often were.” We learn about Morgan Holly, the owner, and how upset he was when his single employee told he she had to quite because she was going to have a baby. Here is the detail I’m talking about:
He might have expected this — she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show — but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.
Those details — the pregnancy and how “those days” dealt with such matters, the private life, change — are important. But, interestingly, though the story is set up in a way that we might expect it, Morgan Holly and this employee are not particularly important to this story.
The newly pregnant employee has a recommendation for a replacement named Leah, a quiet girl Morgan quite liked because he didn’t want someone gabbing with the customers. Further, due to her strict father’s command, she was not allowed to watch (or hear) the movies, so Morgan was even happier because that meant less distractions. The one problem with this employment is that Leah’s father would not allow her to walk home alone so late on a Saturday night. The solution: the local police officer, Ray Elliot, “who often broke his rounds to watch a little of the movie,” would walk her home those weekend nights.
After a section break, Munro proceeds to give us Ray Elliot’s back story. A veteran, “[h]e came home with a vague idea that he had to do something meaningful with the life that had so inexplicably been left to him, but he didn’t know what.” At school, he met Isabel, his teacher, who was married and thirty years old. She’s beautiful and Ray’s fellow classmates often jest in private that “some guyes got all the luck.” Here is how economically Munro develops Ray and Isabel’s relationship:
Ray disliked hearing that kind of talk, and the reason was that he had fallen in love with her. And she with him, which seemed infinitely more surprising. Itw as preposterous to everybody except themselves. There was a divorce — a scandal to her well-connected family and a shock to her husband, who had wanted to marry her since they were children. Ray had an easier time of it than she did, because he had little family to speak of, and those he did have announced that they supposed they wouldn’t be good enough for him now that he was marrying so high up, and they would just stay out of his way in the future. If they expected any denial or reassurance in response to this, they did not get it.
The story circles back to Leah in the most peculiar way. It turns out that Isabel has a disease and is unable to have children. She and Ray never talked about whether they were disappointed by this, but Ray wonders if disappointment weren’t in some way connected to the fact that Isabel wanted to hear all about Leah, the girl Ray walked home on Saturday nights.
I don’t really want to go on here because the story is filled with twists and turns as Ray, Isabel, and Leah live out their lives, for better or for worse. There is a lot of disappointment, more betrayal, more pregnancies, more loss, and in the end we are left with an incredibly deep portrait of a few complex relationships, and I don’t believe anything turns out as we might predict, though it seems very true to life.
All this in just a few pages, where the pace is swift, matching the inexplicably sudden passing of life. Yet, despite the brevity, there is enough detail, often in just a phrase, that we can imagine volumes about even the side relationships, like the one between Isabel and her first husband — really all we know is that he was a veteran himself and he had wanted to marry Isabel since they were children, yet how much that says.
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Alice Munro’s “Gravel” was originally published in the June 27, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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It’s always a good way to start the week: a new story by Alice Munro, who obviously hasn’t slowed down much. This one may be one of my favorites of the recently published (and I have a lot of her back catalog to go through). “Gravel” is a masterful piece that showcases simple style and complex structure so nicely done it looks simple too.
Our narrator is an older woman looking back on something terrible that happened when she was only five years old, something she feels guilty about even though she can’t really remember that much (“I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.”). When she was five and her older sister Caro was nine, her mother became pregnant, allegedly by one of the actors who moved into town with the new professional summer theater.
My mother and father had been among those in favor, my mother more actively so, because she had more time. My father was an insurance agent and travelled a lot. My mother had got busy with various fund-raising schemes for the theatre and donated her services as an usher. She was good-looking and young enough to be mistaken for an actress. She’d begun to dress like an actress, too, in shawls and long skirts and dangling necklaces. She’d left her hair wild and stopped wearing makeup. Of course, I had not understood or even particularly noticed these changes at the time. My mother was my mother. But no doubt Caro had. And my father. Though, from all that I know of his nature and his feelings for my mother, I think he may have been proud to see how good she looked in these liberating styles and how well she fit in with the theatre people.
After she becomes pregnant, she moves herself and the two girls into a small home by a gravel pit.
My mother was the one who insisted on calling attention to it. “We live by the old gravel pit out the service-station road,” she’d tell people, and laugh, because she was so happy to have shed everything connected with the house, the street — the husband — with the life she’d had before.
Through much of the story, the narrator’s five-year-old self has no real idea what is going on. When she visits her father and her mother asks if she had a good time, she simple says yes, “because I thought that if you went to a movie or to look at Lake Huron or ate in a restaurant, that meant that you had had a good time.” At nine, Caro is much more bothered by the whole situation (indirectly, this story is her story rather than the narrator’s); she said yes, too, “but in a tone of voice that suggested that it was none of our mother’s business.”
The story develops wonderfully. Through small details, we get to know these people very well, even if our narrator is someone who is only piecing together poorly remembered moments. Amazingly, it accomplishes this though the story is very short, and nearly half of it dwells on one particular moment.
In the way “Gravel” deals with memory and guilt, and the way it is structured to do so (and not to simply tell a story from start to finish) reminded me a great deal of William Maxwell’s masterpiece, So Long, See You Tomorrow (see my review here). Incidentally, I think such a connection is purposeful. After Maxwell died in 2000, Alice Munro said of So Long, See You Tomorrow, “I thought: so this is how it should be done. I thought: If only I could go back and write again every single thing that I have written.” Certainly she has accomlished something similar but about a very different tragedy than the one Maxwell recounts. I loved it.
Take advantage of the fact that this story is freely available through the link above.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice Munro’s “Axis” was first published in The New Yorker‘s January 31, 2011, issue.
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It’s always nice to see that the weekly story is by Alice Munro. “Axis,” a story that begins half a century ago, when two girls are attending college, and spans the many years to old age, does not disappoint.
When the story begins, Avie and Grace are two college girls, history majors, to be exact. They’re carrying books home for vacation, though they will never read them. Partly, they will never read them because that is the nature of a vacation; partly, though, because an education is not their primarily goal in college.
They understood — everybody understood — that having any sort of job after graduation would be a defeat. Like the sorority girls, they were enrolled here to find somebody to marry. First a boyfriend, then a husband. It wasn’t spoken of in those terms, but there you were. Girl students on scholarships were not usually thought to stand much of a chance, since brains and looks were not believed to go together. Fortunately, Grace and Avie were both attractive. Grace was fair and stately, Avie red-haired, less voluptuous, lively, and challenging. Male members of both their families had joked that they ought to be able to nab somebody.
Both girls have potential. Yes, they have potential in their education, but I mean here that they have solid marriage prospects. Avie is dating Hugo. Avie thought that having sex might make her love Hugo, but mostly it has just created the stress of a potential pregnancy. Avie has just finished telling Grace about a terrible dream in which she has two children with Hugo; one she has locked away in the basement, the other is lively and loved. So Avie has Hugo, but when she’s being honest with herself, she’d rather be with Grace’s boyfriend, Royce, a veteran of World War II. Grace is a virgin, something Royce is not used to but will patiently tolerate for a time.
As happens in an Alice Munro story, once the stage is set there is no more dilly-dallying. We quickly move in time to Royce getting on a bus to visit Grace at her home. At one of the stops, he looks out the window and sees Avie.
He remembered that she had quit college just before her exams. Hugo had graduated and got a job teaching high school in some northern town, where she was to join him and marry him.
Royce is tempted to get off the bus and ask Avie out, but he doesn’t. Instead, he goes to Grace’s home and, primarily interested in one thing (somehow claiming Grace’s “vaunted virginity), he suffers through the niceties of the family, including a provincial day of making strawberry jam.
The story slows down here to allow us to experience these few days before Royce looks back on them with the following sentiment:
He remembered whispering to Grace the day before they were doing the strawberries, kissing under the rush of cold water when her mother’s back was turned. Her fair hair turning dark in the stream of water. Acting as if he worshipped her. How at certain moments that had been true. The insanity of it, the insanity of letting himself be drawn. That family. That mad mother rolling her eyes to heaven.
It seems like the climax of the story has passed — certainly there has almost been a climax — but Munro is not through with these characters. She moves to Avie and Hugo, through their long years together, and finally to a time in old age when Avie and Royce again meet.
This is a powerful story, superbly crafted. I must say, January’s New Yorker fiction has been a great way to begin the year.
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