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A Fitting Finale
- Abstract
Dear Life: Stories
By Alice Munro
Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages
Alice munro has been called “our Chekhov” so often that no one stops to ask what the title means anymore. It obviously means, for one thing, that she is among the best short-story writers now working—with William Trevor and Mavis Gallant, one of the top three—but something else must also be meant, some quality that is rare in English-language fiction (though not perhaps in Russian). Munro herself gives a hint when she describes the rural Canadian town in which she grew up—the small corner of earth to which she has returned again and again since beginning her career in 1968 with the Governor General’s Award-winning Dance of the Happy Shades—as “like a Chekhov village.” The world of her fiction is so particularized and unique, in fact, that it has come to be known as “Munro Country.” The local tourist bureau has even printed guidebooks for the literary pilgrim. To a degree that is almost unheard of among her peers south of the U.S.–Canadian border, Munro roots her stories in feeling for a specific place, a 1,000-square-mile section of southwestern Ontario along Lake Huron—maybe because people, in her view, know human contact only as a “humiliating necessity” and are never firmly rooted in one another.
About the Author
D.G. Myers, literary historian at the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at Ohio State University, writes our fiction chronicle and is the author of the Literary Commentary blog.
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