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Famous for her short stories, Canadian writer Alice Munro is often described as the modern equivalent of Anton Chekhov. Subtle. Perceptive. Moving. Munro's ability to describe the inner lives of ordinary women evokes special admiration.
In the foreword to her new collection, The View From Castle Rock, Munro explains that she has included stories of a more personal nature.
The author is now 75, so this is probably as close to an autobiography as her multitude of fans will get. Munro, however, cautions: "You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on."
Castle Rock is divided into two sections. The first, "No Advantages," presents connected stories based on Munro's ancestors the Laidlaws, who emigrated from Scotland to Canada in the 1800s. Taciturn, religious, literate, they were suspicious of showiness and outsiders. These traits would shape the Canada and Canadians of Munro's rural Ontario childhood.
The first section ends with poignant descriptions of Munro's grandparents and her own parents. The book's most haunting figure is Munro's mother, a dynamic, ambitious schoolteacher destroyed by Parkinson's disease.
In Part Two, "Home," the focus is on Munro and her relationships with girlhood friends, boys, her parents, her employers, her future husband. Told in the first person, these stories describe the economically and culturally limited world of her childhood. Munro -- and this semi-fictional stand-in -- eventually escapes through marriage. Yet she is relentlessly drawn back.
No one writes more beautifully and with less sentiment about children, nature, rural life and the limits placed on people's dreams, particularly women's.
Castle Rock is an extremely good book, filled with subtle prose and insights into human nature. It is not Munro's best collection. A newcomer should not begin with Castle Rock. Far better would be the Everyman's Library edition, Carried Away: A Selection of Stories, published this fall. But for the Munro fanatic, anything from our northern Chekhov is good news.
The View From Castle Rock
By Alice Munro
Knopf, 350 pp., $25.95
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