Here’s the story that Munro keeps telling: A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the girl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self-interested act … Runaway is so good that I don't want to talk about it here. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it … Which leaves me with the simple instruction that I began with: Read Munro! Read Munro!
Here are eight wonderful stories – no, seven great stories and one good one. All seem at first to be about women, but they're about being human – how that condition cradles us, limits us. Most of them begin in the relatively obscure past and proceed slowly and carefully into what we might call the present … None of these stories is particularly original. There's more than a hint of Kay Boyle in ‘Passion,’ in which a young girl runs off for a few hours with a man both drunk and married, more than a hint of William Goldman in ‘Tricks,’ in which another young girl meets someone who might be the improbable man of her dreams. And ‘Trespasses,’ about the follies of a pair of old and desperately stupid hippie parents, could have been written by anyone in this literary generation. But it ain't what Munro does, to paraphrase the old song. It's the way that she does it.
Munro's tone can be bracingly dry. She has no time for those implausible feats of memory often enacted by fictional protagonists; she simply tells us, with unhesitating naturalness, about her characters' early lives, including many things which they themselves will later remember differently, if at all … The long range of Munro's stories is only made possible by her apparently effortless possession of decade beyond decade of the past, her technique being the opposite of so much information-bolstered fiction of the present: she knows that life in the past was unhampered by any sense of its future quaintness, so she doesn't explain. She gives us a past as unselfconscious as today … Munro has a genius for evoking the particular and peculiar atmosphere of relationships, their unspoken pressures and expectations.
There are no happy endings here, but neither are these tales tragedies. They are constructions of calm perplexity, coolly observed human mysteries. One can feel the suspense, poolside, as well as any reader of The Da Vinci Code; one can cast a quick eye toward one's nine-year-old on the high dive and get back to the exact sentence where one left off. The thrilling unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands keep a reader glued—even if that reader is torn by the very conflicts dramatized therein … The story for the ages here, however, is surely the title one, with its multiple runaways, its ghostly gothic moments, and its exploration of erotic love—all narrative ingredients Munro has made her own.
A grim streak runs through Munro’s new collection, Runaway, greater than the physical carnage of her earlier work … Many of these stories, in less deft hands, would be unconscionably purple. Still, Munro’s strength has always been the accumulation of seemingly unrelated detail—the frayed ends of the story yanked suddenly into a knot. But throughout Runaway’s tales, Munro sacrifices her characters to the vagaries of chance with a sheer ruthlessness that is close to unbearable.
Perhaps the contemporary bias toward realism in short fiction is so strong that it is difficult to write about Munro's appetite for drama of a particularly symbolic—and bodice-ripping—nature. And perhaps this in turn explains why, though Munro's taste for gimmick and contrivance is far more pronounced in Runaway than in any of her 11 previous books, few critics noted it … Runaway reveals that Munro is up to some tricks of her own. It's no accident that the story that most explicitly relies on theatricality and self-consciously classical plot devices is called ‘Tricks’ … The effect is self-consciously contrived—yet it haunts the viewer the way a sudden glimpse of a lost childhood self haunts you, revealing what seemed like continuity to be the wildest, most implausible kind of loss.
Runaway does not represent Ms. Munro's artistry at its height. Three overlapping stories (‘Chance,’ ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’) provide an affecting portrait of a woman named Juliet and the harrowing trajectory of her life, but most of the entries in this volume are more stilted affairs. Instead of assuming the organic, musical form of real life, they feel like self-conscious, overworked tales, relying on awkwardly withheld secrets and O'Henryesque twists to create narrative suspense … Many of these tales cut back and forth in time, and by doing so, Ms. Munro emphasizes how memory redraws the past, foregrounding some events while smudging others into shadows, and how the apprehension of mortality, the sense that time is running out, also colors characters' decisions … What's unfortunate about this collection is that Ms. Munro has failed to communicate these insights to the reader with her full array of dazzling talents, choosing instead to clumsily stage-manage her characters' fates.
Munro's thematic consistency is both her great strength and her Achilles-like weakness. She certainly has a level of discipline that can be marveled at. Her prose is clear and unobtrusive, which works well with her characters and settings, but there are also conscious moments when her writing has an intricate and demanding beauty. Miraculously, she usually accomplishes this without compromising the rhythm of the story … The downside to Munro's Olympic dedication to her craft is that nothing much changes in this world. Munro's writing has settled into a kind of regimented intractability.
Often Munro's sparsely told stories read like fairy tales where young women who test fate are later in need of rescuing or suffer unexpected and often bitter consequences for their choices. Mythological imagery is woven throughout: a sacrificial goat, Orion and Cassiopeia in the night sky, a gift of a white heifer, a mother mourning her daughter's disappearance, a fateful storm at sea, a funeral pyre, tricksters and virgins, an oracle. All serve to shape the larger inquiry into where and with whom one finds ‘home’ … Throughout Runaway, Munro details difficult life passages involving separations and homecomings, dislocation and the eternal movement of individuals on buses, ferries, trailers, automobiles and trains. Presented with equal weight is what prevents people from fleeing: sickness, caretaking and the intrusion of death.
Munro's stories begin quietly, and it's often several pages before we know just who the protagonist is, what the central conflicts might be, how we should position ourselves with respect to this experience. Meaning accumulates in a Munro story, inexorably, like compounded daily interest, slowly at first, then with greater and greater speed, weight, and momentum. But there's really never an explosion of meaning at story's end, even in ‘Tricks’ or ‘Passion,’ the two stories here that could be called ‘epiphanic’; more often, there's an implosion, like a star collapsing, pulling all the matter and meaning of the story back together, pulling us in, too, unable to resist the gravity of a thing with so much mass … Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel, and reading them is to become immersed in the concerns and worlds of their various characters.
Whether Munro's women — and the protagonists in this collection are all women — are whip smart or slow on the uptake, their lives rarely proceed smoothly or logically from Point A to Point B. Their plans for themselves are repeatedly tampered with by Fate (so active a character that the capital ‘F’ is definitely needed). And the truth behind their lives may not reveal itself until decades after the story's supposed main event … Throughout the book there is, as always in Munro, an illuminating, unsparing insight into human motive and behavior. Again and again, small moments — closely observed — expand into revelations of the thorny dynamics or buoyant contradictions of the characters at hand.
These stories must be read slowly and savored. They will change your tempo as Eastern theater and dance do, making you notice what is small or still, making you reflect. They are built of startling moments, long back stories, leaps of time and place. There is no simple causal train to take the protagonist from A to Z. What happens is odd, skewed, inner and hardly predictable … Munro has been called Chekhovian in that she writes the comedy of ironic twists and hidden intentions. She is also, in these later stories, Beckettian, telling tales of reduction
Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection … There are the masterpieces: the title story’s wrenching portrayal of an emotionally abused young wife’s inability to leave her laconic husband; and the brilliant novella ‘Powers,’ which spans years and lives, a truncated female friendship that might have offered sustenance and salvation, and contains acute, revelatory discriminations between how women and men experience and perceive ‘reality.’ In a word: magnificent.
