{"id":23284,"date":"2018-01-14T21:29:46","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T01:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=23284"},"modified":"2018-01-14T21:29:46","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T01:29:46","slug":"alice-munro-carried-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2018\/01\/14\/alice-munro-carried-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Munro: “Carried Away”"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/span><\/div>

“Carried Away”<\/strong><\/span>
\nby Alice Munro
\nfrom\u00a0Open Secrets<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

\"\"<\/p>\n

Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n

I<\/span>n much of Munro’s fiction she evokes a sense of a life separate from the objective, observable realities that surround people. For her, a conventional plot — what happens, when, in what order — is not as important as this separate life, the one that goes on inside the mind, the life that can contain irreconcilable disparities, unattainable potentialities, devastating depths, times past and future and never, a life where what did not happen is just as foundational as what did.\u00a0In “Carried Away” we get a story that explores things that did not happen, relationships that never were, lives that ended in objective reality but that continued to work in another’s life.<\/p>\n

The story, which covers the decades from the mid-1910s to the 1950s, is divided into four parts: Letters, Spanish Flu, Accidents, and Tolpuddle Martyrs. Our central character is named Louisa, though we often see her from others’ perspectives so she is sometimes just the Librarian, and sometimes she is virtually nameless, her life a bit hazy at the edges.<\/p>\n

In “Letters,” we meet Louisa as a young woman in her early 20s in the latter days of World War I. With no parents or siblings or significant other, she is alone in the world, though she doesn’t seem to think this will be permanent. She’s already been in a relationship with a doctor who treated her for TB at a sanatorium, but that relationship has ended. When we first see her, though, it looks like another may be starting. She sits reading some letters she has received from a soldier she never met but who saw her at the library and, obviously, developed some kind of crush.<\/p>\n

Louisa feels a connection to this man. She must be flattered, but she also loves to write to him about books. They converse, despite the significant separation in time and space. He says I love you. Of course, the separation from Louisa’s life is most likely the very thing that brings them together in this intimate manner, sharing aspects of themselves they would likely not share otherwise. By the time the war is over, Louisa is looking for some notice that he is either dead or returning home.<\/p>\n

When he does return home, she hopes he will turn up at the library. She keeps the library open ten or fifteen minutes after hours. She even keeps the library open during the worst of the Spanish Flu epidemic, making her appear heroic to some, but she knows it was all entirely selfish. She doesn’t know what this soldier looks like, so she wants to make sure he will find her.<\/p>\n

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She had to be forgiven, didn’t she, she had to be forgiven for thinking, after such letters, that the one thing that could never happen was that he wouldn’t approach her, wouldn’t get in touch with her at all? Never cross her threshold, after such avowals?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He never reveals himself to her, though. Instead, Louisa sees a notice that he is to be married. Soon after, she gets a simple note saying, “I was engaged before I went overseas.” To me, this is heartbreaking. It means he has always known she was there. It means he’s been to see her, during all of her waiting.<\/p>\n

This could be the end of the story, of course. A bit of a betrayal. Two people carried away by their imagined love affair, Louisa always forced to imagine even what the man looked like. But Munro doesn’t end the story there. Instead, we learn about a tragic accident that takes the man’s life. We then go further into the future, even to a point where Louisa has married and lived an entire life. Right next to this life, though, is her life that never happened in reality but that has played out again and again in her head: her life with this soldier who never showed up and who died decades ago.<\/p>\n

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Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

At 47 pages, \u201cCarried Away\u201d is much longer than the typical 30-page Munro story, but there is an ambition, sweep, and scope to it that is magisterial. It covers 50 years, with an additional dive back to an actual event that happened in 1833. The story echoes the self-reliance preached by Ralph Waldo Emerson; it refers to H.G. Wells\u2019 Mankind in the Making<\/em>, which is a wide ranging exploration of reform with a socialist bent; it refers to the agnostic philosophy \u201cbe happy in this life\u201d preached by the very influential but now forgotten lawyer Robert Ingersoll; it also refers to a famous occasion of sworn organization by workers, the so-called Tolpuddle martyrs of 1833; it follows that up by a reference to Bertram Russell\u2019s Bolshevism — Theory and Practice<\/em>; it looks into American capitalism and owner-worker responsibility; it continues the discussion initiated by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James into whether women had the right to sexual lives, education by experience, and independence; and it questions whether either men or women in ordinary life between 1900 and 1950 had the freedoms they deserved.<\/p>\n

The story is an excursion into layers and layers of American life: philosophy, religion, politics, socialism, workers\u2019 rights, and women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cCarried Away\u201d asks what is the harm:<\/p>\n