\nby Alice Munro<\/span>
\nfrom Runaway<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ text_color=””]M[\/fusion_dropcap]unro’s “Soon,” the middle part of a trio of stories about Juliet, begins a few years after “Chances” ends. In that prior story, Juliet started her relationship with Eric in western Canada. When “Soon” begins, Juliet and Eric have a child, Penelope (who will become more central in the next story), and mother and young daughter are visiting Juliet’s parents, Sam and Sara, back in Ontario.<\/p>\n Other than as a potential source of shame (for he and Juliet are not married), Eric is not present. “Soon” is primarily about Juliet’s difficult trip back to her parents and her home. Like many of us who return after years away, home feels strange and strangely familiar.<\/p>\n When she gets there, she sees that the painting she purchased for her parents —\u00a0Chagall’s painting I and the Village<\/em>\u00a0— is hidden away. It’s a strange painting that does seem out of place in a rural Ontario home, but Juliet bought it because it reminded her of Sam and Sara. “It makes me think of their life . . . I don’t know why, but it does.”<\/p>\n This painting was the key to this story for me, though there is so much more going on in “Soon,” as there is in most of Munro’s stories.\u00a0The painting was painted in 1911 while Chagall was in Paris, but the dreamy, lovely, absurd scene is about his hometown in Belarus. It’s a painting Munro knew well. She herself, in 1959, had a print of it hanging in her home (before her first husband asked her to remove it). Robert Thacker’s Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives<\/em>, has a section where Munro talks about the painting and how it represented, in a curious way, a concrete past.<\/p>\n In my bedroom I had a print of Chagall’s\u00a0I and the Village<\/em> which I looked to for help. I don’t like admitting that — the moony cows head, the precious stones, the upside-down church, all seem rather stylish and cleaned-up, in relation to that real past I had to deal with, even as a dream that picture is a long way out — but it is true that when I lay on the bed and looked at it I could feel a lump of complicated painful truth pushing at my heart; I knew it wasn’t empty, I knew that I had streets and houses and conversations inside; not much idea how to get them out and no time or way to get at them.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n When Juliet returns home she expects it to be a rather fraught, boring, dutiful visit. In some ways it is. She writes a letter to Eric in which she clearly thinks there is little for her back with her parents. But later in life, she realizes she was wrong:<\/p>\n When she first read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But this realization is still painful to Juliet. She didn’t realized it soon enough to take advantage of it and the realization uncovers another loss.<\/p>\n Again, there is a lot more going on with “Soon,” but to me Munro is continuing to explore some of the themes she’s gone over through her entire career: leaving home, the freedom, the guilt, the losses that accumulate as life builds up wherever you are. We’ll explore this some more in the last story of this trio, “Silence.”<\/p>\n Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ text_color=””]\u201cS[\/fusion_dropcap]oon\u201d is the second of three stories about Juliet that comprise a 100 plus page novella. \u201cChance\u201d introduced us to Juliet, and tells how she lost her bid for a Ph.D. in Greek at the university in Toronto and then fell, by chance, into a totally different life with a charismatic fisherman in Whale Bay.<\/p>\n \u201cSoon\u201d covers a brief visit Juliet makes east with her baby to see her parents. Juliet is still with Eric, but she is unmarried, a not very common thing in the sixties. Worse, her 13-month-old baby is now part of the mix. Juliet has always had a close relationship with her parents, who as intellectuals were a little unconventional themselves. The story explores, however, Juliet\u2019s inevitable maturation and separation from her parents has left her father feeling angry, her mother feeling lost, and Juliet herself wanting nothing more than to return as fast as possible to Whale Bay. Thomas Wolfe says you can\u2019t go home again. Juliet, for sure, cannot return to what was probably an isolated and demanding, or even suffocating, family of origin.<\/p>\n Juliet\u2019s father may have lost his teaching job in a fracas over Juliet\u2019s unmarried state. He seems annoyed at Juliet and the whole situation. No longer teaching, he has taken up truck gardening. Ironically, he now appears to be modelling Eric\u2019s free-wheeling love life and seems to have an inappropriate, even slightly disgusting, interest in the young caretaker who helps him with his invalid wife. Her father cuts Juliet by remarking that the caretaker \u201chas restored [his] faith in women.\u201d<\/p>\n The caretaker, of course, had absolutely rescued Sam from the chaos that Sara\u2019s illness had become. Nonetheless, Juliet sees her father spraying Irene with a hose — the same thing an old benighted husband had done to a young girl who was later murdered in \u201cOpen Secrets.\u201d<\/p>\n Juliet\u2019s mother presents an even more complicated challenge. Her health, always frail, has taken a turn for the worse. She is apparently having an affair of the mind with a local fundamentalist minister, a turn of events that is also somewhat disgusting to Juliet.<\/p>\n Sara\u2019s clinginess is nothing new. She had cultivated a very, very close relationship with Juliet in the old days. Juliet and her father had to stay up late to find the privacy to talk about intellectual things.<\/p>\n Juliet composes a letter in her head to Eric:\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing here, I should never have come here, I can\u2019t wait to go home.\u201d<\/p>\n Inevitably, when Juliet\u2019s dying mother makes an emotional appeal to Juliet, Juliet is turned to stone.<\/p>\n My faith isn\u2019t so simple,\u201d said Sara, her voice all shaky (and seeming to Juliet, at this moment, strategically pathetic). \u2018I can\u2019t describe it. But it\u2019s \u2013 all I can say \u2013 it\u2019s something<\/em>. It\u2019s a wonderful \u2013 something<\/em>. When it gets really bad for me \u2013when it gets so bad I \u2013 You know what I think then? I think, all right. I think\u2014 Soon. Soon I\u2019ll see Juliet<\/em>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Juliet\u2019s response? She \u201cturned away.\u201d<\/p>\n You can\u2019t go home again.<\/p>\n You also, if you\u2019re a daughter, cannot stay married to your mother.<\/p>\n But breaking away? Pain. Such terrible and necessary pain.<\/p>\n 2<\/p>\n \u201cSoon\u201d versus now. Juliet\u2019s mother is so ill she can only have faith in \u201csoon.\u201d<\/p>\n But Munro\u2019s later stories often mention the necessity of \u201cpaying attention\u201d to the present. In this case, the present is Eric, the baby, and Whale Bay. The present is also the changed condition of her parents\u2019 life, her mother\u2019s illness and her father\u2019s lost job.<\/p>\n Whether their weird distance from her is due to her failed PhD or her unmarried-mother state, or both, it seems clear that so much has changed that this visit is basically a failure. \u201cSoon\u201d is how fast Juliet needs to leave.<\/p>\n And \u201cSoon\u201d is how fast her mother will actually die, although Juliet doesn\u2019t know that.<\/p>\n Later, Juliet may look back and wonder how she didn\u2019t realize how close death was. As if she was\u00a0 not paying attention.<\/p>\n 3<\/p>\n This is another story that refers the reader to some corollary art, in this case, Chagall and Picasso. (Recall that the first Juliet story referred the reader to Greek myth and to a French movie.)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Runaway.jpg?resize=342%2C530&ssl=1\")
Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Chagall.jpg?resize=804%2C1024&ssl=1\")
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