Apologia

A three time winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, Alice Munro is well recognized among Canadian writers. Certainly, she deserves all the praise that she has recieved. Her unique style makes her short stories and her only novel, "Lives of Girls and Women", gems in the cannon of Canadian literature.

One of the most impressive qualities about her writing is her honesty. Recognizing that "nothing is easy, nothing is simple" ("Alice Munro"), she captures the complexities and messiness of life in her writing. For example, "Lives" is a coming-of-age story in rural Ontario, but she refuses to sentimentalize rurality or childhood (McGill). She depicts how stifling provincial anonymity and conservatism are, as Del, her protagonist, struggles against them. In addition, she captures how strange growing up is. For instance, when Del realizes that adults are not as omnipotent as she once thought, she describes her aging aunts thus: "in time every word, every expression of the face, every flutter of the hand came to seem something learned long ago, perfectly remembered, and ... something constructed with terrible care" (Munro 50). Munro's truthful and nuanced treatment of familiar themes is rare and refreshing.

In addition to her truthfulness, Munro has an incredibly keen understanding of human psychology. To illustrate, Del, the classic Munro narrator at an ironic distance from her own life (McGill), has an uncanny way of seeing and describing people's motives. For example, Del notices how her mother "was on the side of poor people everywhere, on the side of Negroes and Jews and Chinese and women, but she could not bear drunkenness, no, and she could not bear sexual looseness, dirty language, haphazard lives, contented ignorance, and so she had to exclude the Flats Road people from the really oppressed and deprived people, the real poor whom she still loved" (Munro 7). Del's description of her mother also exemplifies how she and Munro are acutely aware of life's subtle ironies. Munro's writing is so good because she has such a deep understanding of human nature.

Not only does Munro capture the complexities and inconsistencies of life, she does this in a skillful and illuminating way. She works for what she calls "emotional exactness... exactness of resonance" (Martin) through subtle detail and evocative turns of phrases. For instance, Del describes her brother's praying as the making of "desperate, private grimaces... as hard to look at as skinned flesh" (Munro 97). She writes that "Seeing someone have faith, close up, is no easier than seeing someone chop a finger off" (Munro 97). Munro resolves the contradictions and messiness of life by a sense of wonder. She celebrates the humdrum of the everyday lives of ordinary people by revealig how they are "amazing and unfathomable", "deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum" (Munro 210).

Somehow, Munro manages to do all this in an incredibly concise way. As Holcolme puts it, "nothing is wasted. Nothing is irrelevant. Every word glows. Munro is able to capture the shape and mood, the flavour of a life in 30 pages" (Holcombe). For instance, she describes a young girl who was beat by her mentally unstable mother as "suspicious of toys, cookies, milk anything we offered her, but she never whined or cried. Touched or cuddled, she submitted warily, her body giving off little tremors of dismay, her heart beating hard like the heart of a bird if you capture it in your hand. Yet she would lie on Uncle Benny's lap or fall asleep against his shoulder, limp as spaghetti. his hand covered the bruises on her legs" (Munro 16). Readers respond and connect strongly to her writing. Personally, I recognized my own extremely serious and easily embarassed self in Del as she steps awkwardly into adolescence "[feeling] the weight of my mother's eccentricities, of something absurd and embarassing about her ... I did want to repudiate her, crawl into favour, orphaned, abandoned, in my own wrinkled sleeves" (Munro 54). Munro's concentrated insight into humanity is what makes Holcombe claim that she teaches us "what it means to be human".

Munro's poignantly recognizable stories are delightfully human and immensely likable. At the end of the novel, Del is "greedy for Jubilee... [for] every last thing, every layer of speech and tought, stroke of light on bark or wells, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together- radiant, everlasting (Munro 210). Similarly, the reader wants every last subtle, illuminating detail of Munro's world to continue. With her distinctly vivid style, Munro has made a very memorable contribution to Canadian literature.