For anyone fascinated by the art of the short story, or confused by the sheer multiplicity of short stories to be read and unsure of where to start, the Guardian website’s Brief Survey of the Short Story series is the place to go. The brilliant thing about the series is that it reaches beyond the usual suspects (Chekhov, Mansfield, Carver) towards the radical (Borowski, Davis, Ballard) and into the realms of the visionary (Schulz, Walser, Jones). The series’s author, Chris Power, writes with knowledge, passion and a proselytising zeal. I hope they turn his articles into a book, because they’re a truly valuable resource, the kind of pieces you want to reread and keep for reference.
This week the series reached Part 37 and the writer under discussion was Alice Munro. Munro has become fashionable recently, which is wonderful, because she deserves the publicity. But listening to the way she is sometimes talked about I often have the feeling she is misunderstood. People think she does social commentary, or that she’s a kind of latter day Katherine Mansfield, all exquisite workmanship and finely tuned nuance. In fact she’s wayward and not a little dangerous. Her stories – many of them novella length – are discursive and wild, novelistic in scope, even though she claims she cannot ‘do’ novels. The basis of their plots lies in the quotidian: love, aging, family relationships. Yet the direction they take – into madness, obsession, the territory of the spiritual outsider – always tends towards the metaphysical and the gothic.
From what I read about her before reading her, I thought I would enjoy Munro for her skill but find her too safe. Thank God these misconceptions didn’t put me off!
Carson McCullers’s ‘Wunderkind’ or ‘Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland’ could be Alice Munro stories.
One of the first stories I read by her, ‘Powers’, in her 2004 collection Runaway, turned out to be a little slipstream masterpiece. ‘Free Radicals’, in her most recent book Too Much Happiness, is downright frightening but at the same time one of the blackest pieces of humour you will ever read.
The unadorned brilliance of her writing is, quite simply, thrilling to encounter. She’s one of those writers you envy whilst knowing you don’t have a hope of emulating her.
She reminds you, when you need reminding, of what writing is.
This morning I finished the second draft of Spin. A novella inspired by a Greek myth, it’s one of the most personal pieces of fiction I’ve yet written.
And this evening I wrote the first, shuddering paragraph of something new.