Del Jordan, Munro’s narrator, has an uncanny way of seeing and describing peoples’ motives. For example, she describes her mother in this way:
My mother was not popular on the Flats Road. She spoke to people here in a voice not so friendly as she used in town, with severe courtesy and a somehow noticeable use of good grammar… She 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 (7).
Already old enough to recognize her mother’s faults, Del describes how her mother looks down on the people of Flats Road. Close to Del’s age, I became aware of a similar fault in my own mother, but I was less deft at articulating what I felt. Del describes the small, intangible ways in which her mother snubs them, by using “a somehow noticeable use of good grammar”. Del’s mother loves the idea of caring about the weak, but she is too detached from the actual dispossessed and their miserable conditions to genuinely feel for them. In this way, she reminds me of myself and my generation in general – we champion climate change without ever setting foot in a forest, and fight about poverty in export processing zones without ever entering a factory or a slum… The detached distance with which Del describes her mother shows that she has not yet gained self-consciousness- she hasn't yet learned to be embarrassed of her parents, as teenagers are apt to be. Munro skillfully allows us to get to know Del, the person Del is describing and the relationship between them in very few words.
While Del has a precocious understanding of some aspects of the other characters, she is less eager to examine herself. When she bites Mary Agnes’s arm: “I bit and bit and broke the skin and in pure freedom thinking I had done the worst thing I would ever do, I tasted Mary Agnes Oliphant’s blood” (46), she does not admit that her exaltation stems not only from doing something wicked, but from her jealousy of Mary Agnes. The reader can sense her resentment from an earlier disclosure: “The nimble malice that danced under their courtesies to the rest of the world was entirely lacking in their attentions to each other, to brother and sister. For each other they had only tenderness and pride. And for Mary Agnes Oliphant. I could not help thinking they preferred her to me… [She], it seemed to me, was received with a more unmixed, and shining, confident affection” (33).
As Del grows, her perception of people changes. After Uncle Craig’s death, she describes Auntie Grace and Aunt Elspeth in this way:
They told their same stories, they played their same jokes, which now seemed dried out, brittle with use; in time every word, every expression of the face, every flutter of the hands came to seem something learned long ago, perfectly remembered, and each of their two selves was seen to be something constructed with terrible care; the older they got the more frail and admirable and inhuman this construction appeared (50).
This pitiful description of her aunts contrasts with her earlier, more joyful description. She is growing up as fast as they are fading away; she realizes that adults are not as omnipotent as she once thought.
I have to share one more quote from the book that almost made me cry. It’s a description of Diane, a young girl who was beat by her mentally unstable mother.
She was 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 (16).
The contrast between the tender, damaged Diane and carefree, innocent Del is heartbreaking. Munro has a gift for depicting intriguingly human characters who are deliciously and poignantly recognizable.
My mother was not popular on the Flats Road. She spoke to people here in a voice not so friendly as she used in town, with severe courtesy and a somehow noticeable use of good grammar… She 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 (7).
Already old enough to recognize her mother’s faults, Del describes how her mother looks down on the people of Flats Road. Close to Del’s age, I became aware of a similar fault in my own mother, but I was less deft at articulating what I felt. Del describes the small, intangible ways in which her mother snubs them, by using “a somehow noticeable use of good grammar”. Del’s mother loves the idea of caring about the weak, but she is too detached from the actual dispossessed and their miserable conditions to genuinely feel for them. In this way, she reminds me of myself and my generation in general – we champion climate change without ever setting foot in a forest, and fight about poverty in export processing zones without ever entering a factory or a slum… The detached distance with which Del describes her mother shows that she has not yet gained self-consciousness- she hasn't yet learned to be embarrassed of her parents, as teenagers are apt to be. Munro skillfully allows us to get to know Del, the person Del is describing and the relationship between them in very few words.
While Del has a precocious understanding of some aspects of the other characters, she is less eager to examine herself. When she bites Mary Agnes’s arm: “I bit and bit and broke the skin and in pure freedom thinking I had done the worst thing I would ever do, I tasted Mary Agnes Oliphant’s blood” (46), she does not admit that her exaltation stems not only from doing something wicked, but from her jealousy of Mary Agnes. The reader can sense her resentment from an earlier disclosure: “The nimble malice that danced under their courtesies to the rest of the world was entirely lacking in their attentions to each other, to brother and sister. For each other they had only tenderness and pride. And for Mary Agnes Oliphant. I could not help thinking they preferred her to me… [She], it seemed to me, was received with a more unmixed, and shining, confident affection” (33).
As Del grows, her perception of people changes. After Uncle Craig’s death, she describes Auntie Grace and Aunt Elspeth in this way:
They told their same stories, they played their same jokes, which now seemed dried out, brittle with use; in time every word, every expression of the face, every flutter of the hands came to seem something learned long ago, perfectly remembered, and each of their two selves was seen to be something constructed with terrible care; the older they got the more frail and admirable and inhuman this construction appeared (50).
This pitiful description of her aunts contrasts with her earlier, more joyful description. She is growing up as fast as they are fading away; she realizes that adults are not as omnipotent as she once thought.
I have to share one more quote from the book that almost made me cry. It’s a description of Diane, a young girl who was beat by her mentally unstable mother.
She was 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 (16).
The contrast between the tender, damaged Diane and carefree, innocent Del is heartbreaking. Munro has a gift for depicting intriguingly human characters who are deliciously and poignantly recognizable.
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