At the end of Dear Life is a suite of four stories that Munro says are 'autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact' ... They seem to me as good as anything she has ever done, but also to strike out in the direction of a new, late style — one that is not so much a departure as a compressing or summing up of her whole career ... As is so often the case now in Munro’s fiction, the drama sneaks up and then slips past almost before you’re aware of it. The descriptions are, even by Munro standards, precise and economical, and the mood is less angry or sorrowful than merely accepting ... Many of these stories are told in Munro’s now familiar and much remarked on style, in which chronology is upended and the narrative is apt to begin at the end and end in the middle ... Munro is among the least fanciful of short story writers, seldom resorting to an image or a metaphor. This may reflect a lifelong habit of Canadian understatement — a suspicion of cleverness and a resistance to making too much of things — but it also accords with a sense in her fiction that the world is strange enough, without need of embellishment.
Her 14 stories are so fluid and close to the mystery of life that reading them is like being inside the mind of a writer as she creates, shaping language within her spacious imagination, suffusing words with empathy, darting in unexpected directions before she reveals a final mysterious truth ... Munro begins her stories in surprising places, usually in the midst of the action. It is a measure of the restless energy of these tales that several start on trains ... Munro writes about ordinary people dealing with confusions, failures, and sustained visions of what might have been; she skewers the narrow-minded and creates lasting portraits of the neglected and forlorn, unveiling their secrets with delicate grace ... Dear Life is a wondrous gift; a reminder of why Munro’s work endures.
In Dear Life, she shows no sign of running out of material nor any sloppiness toward the form she has so gracefully deployed for almost half a century. The book is more, however, than just the latest evidence of her excellence. Munro offers something striking in Dear Life: a distinct turn to autobiography and a revealing window into the workings of her mind ... The 'not quite stories' are more like meditations on memory and analyses of the act of storytelling than biographical sketches. Reading these stories will tell you something about Alice Munro’s life, but it will tell you more about Alice Munro’s mind—and, not entirely surprisingly, this proves to be even more compelling ... Even when she is hewing close to personal history, she is conscious of the particular kind of truth required by fiction—perfect pitch and proportion, and perhaps less verisimilitude.
The casually impeccable stories in her latest collection, Dear Life, are somewhat more traditional in that they are largely focused on a defining episode of a character’s life. It’s still possible to piece together a broader history — Munro has a genius, no empty word here, for selecting details that keep unfolding in the reader’s mind — but the scope has tightened ... The plots, if it’s possible to call such natural seeming accounts plots, build to big cinematic scenes ... No story is quite as haunting as 'Amundsen,' the tale of an abortive engagement between a young teacher who takes a job at a tubercular hospital in a wintry rural outpost and the presiding doctor who is all business even when making love ... The classic Munro figure of a woman, usually with unfulfilled literary yearnings, making a getaway from a stale or stifling marriage appears repeatedly, though the balance sheet of happiness isn’t altered for long by new passion ... Dear Life has something of a valedictory quality to it, but the consciousness behind these stories has a vitality that, thankfully, seems in no danger of ending any time soon.
Dear Life, Alice Munro's exquisitely calibrated collection of stories, celebrates the essence of existence, no matter how mundane ... consistently clear-eyed, nuanced and enthralling ... Though her compelling tales take place within the past 70 years, they are never nostalgic — not even at their most personal ... She dances between intimacy and distance in her precise observations, and the reader skitters along to keep pace. Munro starts from the premise that the human condition is mysterious, actions often inexplicable and motivations frequently left unexamined ... Not every story is shattering. Munro writes as movingly about the prosaic as she does the momentous ... Her prose is spare, graceful and beautifully crafted, her vision expansive. What Munro does with a story is like alchemy.
Most of the stories in Dear Life could be called love stories, which is only to say that love – romantic, familial, often 'inappropriate' – is one of the engines that drive the plots. Though many of them take place in what her publishers call 'Alice Munro country' – rural or small-town Ontario, places in which the community and the past weigh heavily on the individual and the present – each is very different from the others; to paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy love story is unhappy in its own way ... she has lived through a series of rather drastic cultural and historical shifts. And she has often written about the moments when these seismic social changes destabilize her characters' most basic assumptions ... It is the highest compliment to say these autobiographical segments seem very much like Alice Munro stories: understated, intense, resonant, nuanced and profound.
Dear Life, her 13th collection, only serves to burnish her reputation for creating intelligent, sophisticated stories out of inarguably humble materials ... As in much of Munro's work, a strong current of darkness courses under the placid surface of these stories, several of them set during World War II or its immediate aftermath ... Munro displays her customary economy of language in portraying these events, but she reserves her keenest prose for painting her characters in brisk, distinctive strokes ... As precisely drawn as these sketches may be, Munro coyly contrasts them with the artifice of her fiction ... It's with gratitude, then, that we can acknowledge with this one that her considerable gifts remain undiminished.
Her writing continues in its understated mode, but the simplicity seems now to reflect an increased urgency, rather than a diminished capacity. There’s a kind of cut-the-crap quality to this latest batch of stories — material that might have once have taken up 20 pages she now deals with in a couple of sentences, unsentimentally, almost in passing ... the voice is newly sharpened, as if she were freshly aware of only having so many words remaining in her allotment ... It’s as if, after decades of plot trickery and composite characters, she longs to remove all the filters from her light, to show us the bare bulb. Here, finally, is the intelligence itself, the compassionate but merciless awareness that she has shone through all her hundreds of stories ... Munro, equipped with a head-lamp the likes of which we may never see again, continues to explore.
With Dear Life, her engrossing new collection of stories, Munro can count on more critical acclaim and public appreciation, for there is no writer quite as good at illustrating the foibles of love, the confusions and frustrations of life or the inner cruelty and treachery that can be revealed in the slightest gestures and changes of tone ... Reckless passion and impulsiveness are as common in these stories as hopelessness or a vague discontent ... Men are generally negative fields of force in these 14 rueful stories, with women seemingly only in their planetary orbit ... Written in wry, limpid prose and constructed in a seemingly plotless, elliptical way, the stories of Dear Life violate a host of creative writing rules, but they establish yet again Munro’s psychological acuity, clear-eyed acceptance of frailties and mastery of the short story form.
What follows is a subversive challenge to the idea of autobiography: a purposeful melding of fact, fiction and feeling. Like Muriel Spark’s Curriculum Vitae and Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, Munro’s 'final four works' will loom like megaliths over all who pick up their pens to write about her in the future ... In this book, Munro has laid bare the foundations of her fiction as never before. Lovers of her writing must hope this is not, in fact, her finale. But if it is, it’s spectacular.
Many of these fictions are about mildly transgressive loves ... Munro's stories have long spans; they have also tended, over the last decade, to be genre-defyingly long. But there is a rediscovered economy of expression at work in this outstanding collection, with the most satisfying stories filling about 25 pages. Her technique with time is remarkable: she continues her fictions where others would conclude, sliding from near-closure to epilogues in which the haunting truth of an unresolved mystery is uncovered.
Her talent is formidable but she has never been self-seeking: her short stories have a subtle, unshowy, covert brilliance ... She has a gift for introducing characters who seem walk-on parts but who redirect and transform narrative ... Munro is acute about the way people disrupt one another ... Munro's stories sometimes finish with a comparably expectant lightness: endings as beginnings – perfectly judged.
These stories are perfect. Of course they are ... Dear Life is a collection as rich and surprising as any in Alice Munro’s deep career ... 'Finale' deepens the mystery, and is proof of Munro’s enduring wisdom and grace. Because of course these are stories — beautifully crafted — even if they are also life ... The figures in 'Finale' are more ghost-like than her usual characters, their motivations more oblique; Munro admits that she cannot set details down in ways that make strict sense, as stories demand. She invites, as she often does, the unknowable.
Munro spices up her stories with dashes of sex but adds the sober reminder that most of the personalities we are reading about belong to the United Church ... When we look at photo albums of our childhoods we can often recall the place and the feeling we had when being there. They are fragments of our lives but Munro is able to nimbly weave her past into wonderful stories ... The stories seem plausible, yet are works of art.
Often richly metaphorical, her work is so beguiling at the level of story that it’s only on a third or fourth reading you begin to notice subtextual layers, the poetic subsoil ... Favourite Munrovian themes are explored: 'the persistence of desire' (to use John Updike’s pithy term); the conflict between the impulse to self-fulfilment and parental, mostly maternal, duty; the challenging love lives of the physically or psychologically damaged ... To be honest is to be moral. The other great morality of her fiction is that it is compassionate and nonjudgmental – more than ever, now that she is an octogenerian ... In this collection, too, her abiding concerns with class, gender and religion continue to find expression ... This is a fresh masterpiece, surrounded by stories that are simultaneously old and new. Implicit in this volume is an invitation to view Munro’s life work as a unity, an evolving work, almost like one very long novel ... From very simple stuff she has created very great literature.
Munro focuses on every aspect of our ordinary existence and makes it seem as extraordinary as it actually is ... Most of these stories take place in the small Ontario towns that serve as unpretentious settings for Munro's powerful propensity to reveal the profound in the everyday. And though we travel a lot, we settle in fully realized scenes and recollection, and in forceful exposition in these ordinary places where the extraordinary takes place ... The ride, the jump, the surmise; it's that feeling of holding on for dear life and then letting go that these stories reward us with.
Munro (Too Much Happiness) can depict key moments without obscuring the reality of a life filled with countless other moments—told or untold ... There are no clunkers here ... And for the first time, Munro writes about her childhood ... These feature the precision of her fiction with the added interest of revealing the development of Munro’s eye and her distance from her surroundings, both key, one suspects, in making her the writer she is. While many of these pieces appeared in the New Yorker, they read differently here; not only has Munro made changes, but more importantly, read together, the stories accrete, deepen, and speak to each other.
A revelation, from the most accomplished and acclaimed of contemporary short story writers ... It’s no surprise that every story in the latest collection by Canada’s Munro (Too Much Happiness, 2009, etc.) is rewarding and that the best are stunning. They leave the reader wondering how the writer manages to invoke the deepest, most difficult truths of human existence in the most plainspoken language. But the real bombshell, typically understated and matter-of-fact, comes before the last pieces, which the author has labeled 'Finale' ... The author knows what matters, and the stories pay attention to it.
