SOURCE: "The Plots of Life: The Realism of Alice Munro," in Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 235-50.

[Woodcock was a Canadian educator, editor, author, and critic. In the following essay, he explores realism in Munro's writing, particularly as it relates to her younger female characters.]

But the development of events on that Saturday night; that fascinated me; I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvized. (Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades)

There is a challenging ambivalence in Alice Munro's stories and her open-ended episodic novels, a glimmering fluctuation between actuality and fictional reality, or, if one prefers it, a tension between autobiography and invention which she manipulates so superbly that both elements are used to the full and in the process enrich each other.

The paperback edition of Munro's second novel, Who Do You Think You Are?, bears on its cover the reproduction of a neo-realist painting by Ken Danby, called "The Sunbather." It has no illustrative function; none of the episodes that make up the novel concerns or even mentions sunbathing. Yet it is hard to think of a painting that could have been better chosen to convey the special tone and flavour of Munro's writing.

A girl sits naked on a partly shaded patch of grass, her knees drawn up, her arms resting on them, her cheek resting on a wrist. Everything is rendered with the meticulous exactitude that only tempera, as a medium, makes possible—the tones of the gently tanning skin perfectly caught, the grass blades spiky yet pliable in the darkening green of high summer; the girl's face shows neither joy nor discontent, but a kind of indrawn pensiveness. Yet the realism, precise and particular as it may be, is much more than mimetic. The artist is not merely representing life, not merely recording how a particular girl with rather greasy hair and a largish bottom looked when she sat on the grass on a certain day in July. He is creating an image, outside time and place, that stands in our minds not merely as a painted surface, but as an epitome, a focussing of several generalities that come together in its eternal moment—generalities like youth and girlishness and the benison of sunlight and the suggestion of fertility that we sense in the girl's broad hips and at the same time in the springing green of the grass and weed leaves among which she sits.

And this, except that she is using words rather than paint to impress her images on the mind, is very near to what Alice Munro tries to do. Just as magic realist painters create a kind of super-reality by the impeccable presentation of details in a preternaturally clear light, and in this way isolate their images from actuality, so Munro has combined documentary methods with a style as clear as the tempera medium in painting. In this essay I propose to discuss the methods in the hope of illuminating the ends.

Alice Munro has been rightly reluctant to offer theoretical explanations of her methods, for she is quite obviously an anti-dogmatic, the kind of writer who works with feeling ahead of theory. But even on the theoretical level she is shrewd in defining the perimeters of her approach, perhaps negatively rather than positively. She once, for example, in an essay written for John Metcalf's The Narrative Voice, entitled "The Colonel's Hash Resettled," cautioned against attempts to read symbolism excessively into her stories. And she was right, for essentially her stories are what they say, offering their meaning with often stark directness, and gaining their effect from their intense visuality, so that they are always vivid in the mind's eye, which is another way of saying that she has learnt the power of the image and how to turn it to the purposes of prose.

Her visuality is not merely a matter of rendering the surface, the realm of mere perception, for she has understood that one of the great advantages of any effective imagist technique is that the image not merely presents itself. It reverberates with the power of its associations, and even with the intensity of its own isolated and illuminated presence. Munro herself conveyed something of this when John Metcalf, remarking on the fact that she seemed to "glory in the surfaces and textures," asked whether she did not in fact feel "'surfaces' not to be surfaces," and she answered that there was "a kind of magic … about everything," "a feeling about the intensity of what is there."

When Alice Munro first began to write, her work tended to be undervalued, except by a few exceptionally percipient readers like Robert Weaver, because her tales of Ontario small-town life were taken to be those of a rather conventional realist with a certain flair for local colour. And realism at that time, following its decline in the visual arts, was going into a somewhat lesser eclipse in literature. Canada was becoming aware of modernism, and this meant that for a time at least writers were concerned with thematic and symbolic fiction rather than with anything that savoured of the mimetic.

Alice Munro has always been one of those fortunate and self-sufficient writers who never really become involved in movements or in literary fashions. From her start she had her own view of life, largely as she had lived it herself, and her aim was to express it in a fiction distinguished by craftsmanship and clear vision rather than by self-conscious artifice. It was a curiously paradoxical method of self-cultivation and self-effacement that she followed, for she has always written best when her stories or the episodes in her novels were close to her own experience in a world she knew, yet at the same time she cultivated a prose from which authorly mannerisms were so absent that it seemed as though the stories had their own voices. In the process Alice Munro became, next to Marian Engel, perhaps Canada's best prose stylist.

But linked to the pellucid clarity of that voice, or voices, there was always the intense vision—and in this context I mean vision as a power of visualizing. The comparison with magic realist painters that I made early in this essay is not merely an analogical one, for Munro is always deeply concerned with describing, with establishing scenes and people clearly in the mind's eye, and as in real life, so in her stories, we establish our conception of the character of people first by recognizing what they look like and how they speak, and then, such familiarity established, proceeding inward to minds and feelings. The photographic element in her presentation of scenes and characters as visualizable images is an essential factor in her writing.

The camera, of course, does not always lie, but through the photographer's conscious selectiveness and even more through the tendency of the lens to isolate the image from the chaos of actuality, it does offer us a different reality from that which we normally perceive. In an interesting essay entitled "Alice Munro and the American South," J.R. (Tim) Struthers discussed the influence on Munro of writers like Eudora Welty and James Agee, and in doing so he talked of the way in which both these writers were fascinated by the possibilities of photography as a medium and its relationship to the kind of realistic writing which they carried on. They saw the special literalness of the photograph not as a usurpation of the role of imaginative perception but as a means of enhancing it. In this sense Struthers talks of Munro as having a "visual or photographic imagination," and as an example he cites the ending of a harrowing little story of the scalding death of a baby, "The Time of Death," which appears in her first volume of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades. The story drifts away into its intended anticlimax as the little shabby neighbourhood absorbs the minor tragedy and then, at the very end, the narrator steps backward out of the stunted lives of the characters and stands like a photographer taking a middle-distance shot of the setting:

There was this house, and the other wooden houses that had never been painted, with their steep patched roofs and their narrow, slanting porches, the wood-smoke coming out of their chimneys and dim children's faces pressed against their windows. Behind them there was the strip of earth, ploughed in some cases, run to grass in others, full of stones, and behind this the pine trees, not very tall. In front were the yards, the dead gardens, the grey highway running out from town. The snow came, falling slowly, evenly, between the highway and the houses and the pine trees, falling in big flakes at first and then in smaller and smaller flakes that did not melt on the hard furrows, the rock of the earth.

This paragraph, which terminates the story, is not only a good example of Munro's ability to create sharply visual images, still shots, that stir our feelings, in this case pitying despair. It also, by an echo many readers must have recognized, establishes her links with an earlier strain of realism, that of the James Joyce of Dubliners. The Joyce story I mean, of course, is "The Dead"; though the title of the story is reminiscent of Munro's, the main action of the story is quite different from hers, but in the end there is the final paragraph in which, as in "The Time of Death," the idea of death and the image of snow are brought together:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly into the Bog of Allen, and, farther westward, softly falling over the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The resemblance is tenuous but haunting, and the echo is quite clear. I am not suggesting that there is a conscious borrowing here, for, as all writers know, recollections of their reading can lodge in recesses of the mind until they are called up to fit into the bricolage that the imagination makes out of the resources of memory, conscious and unconscious alike. More important, perhaps, is the general resemblance between the kind of realism that Alice Munro developed during the 1950s and that of the early days of modernism, the kind of realism one finds not only in the early Joyce and—more lyrically expressed—in the early Lawrence, but also in their continental European contemporaries like Thomas Mann and Italo Svevo. There is the same tendency towards the Bildungsroman, whether manifest in a novel or disguised in a cluster of related stories; the sense of a society observed with oppressive closeness from within by someone who wants to escape; the concern for the appalling insecurities created by what was then called social climbing, and now is called upward mobility; the agonized awareness of the perils of moving through the transitions of life, from childhood to adolescence, from adulthood to age.

While Alice Munro's approach has a great deal in common with this European realism of the early part of the century that trembled on the edge of modernism, without herself going forward—as some of the modernists like Joyce and Wyndham Lewis did—from realism to the extremes of formalism, it has little in common with the kind of prairie writing that represented realism for Canadians during the decades between the great wars. Writers such as Robert Stead, Martha Ostenso and Frederick Philip Grove were concerned with the pioneer farmers and their struggle with the frontier lands of the great plains. Alice Munro was dealing with a society that had long passed out of the pioneer stage, and represented a decaying established culture rather than a frontier one. The problem of those who inhabited it was not, as it had been with Grove's characters, to conquer the wilderness without being destroyed in the process, but to escape before one had been dragged down into the mental stagnation and physical decay of the marginal farmlands of Ontario.

Alice Munro herself grew up in this background, and much of the content of her stories and novels, if it is not strictly autobiographical, does echo the experiences of her youth. Like Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women, she was brought up on a farm where her father bred silver foxes without ever prospering greatly; her mother, like Del's, was a bright, frustrated woman, whose iconoclastic cast of mind contradicted her social ambition, and who died of Parkinson's disease. Again like more than one of her heroines, Munro married and moved west to British Columbia, which gave her another terrain for her stories; also like them, she stepped out of a disintegrating marriage and returned to Ontario. In other words, she wrote of what she knew best, and while each of her stories lives within its own complete world and is not a mere mirroring of the writer's life, it is inevitable that the fictions she drew out of the intensely remembered country of her childhood should be more convincing than those she conceived in British Columbia, where she was never completely at home.

Turning to the books themselves, there are three collections of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You and The Moons of Jupiter, and two novels, Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? They have appeared at fairly symmetrical intervals, between three and four years from one book to the other, and up to now they have alternated in form, a novel of related episodes following a collection of miscellaneous stories.

Dance of the Happy Shades appeared in 1968. It was a late date in terms of Munro's writing life, for she had been publishing stories sporadically since the early 1950s, and I remember when I met her round about 1955 I did so with pleased recognition, since I had already read and admired some of her stories. I am sure I became aware of them through Robert Weaver, who more than anyone else "discovered" her, broadcasting her stories on various CBC programmes he ran, publishing them in Tamarack Review when it began in 1956, and including them in his Oxford anthologies, Canadian Stories, of which the first appeared in 1960.

Munro's experience was not unique; it was that of almost all Canadian writers of fiction, who during the 1950s and 1960s had to face a reaction against the short story on the part of both book publishers and popular magazines in Canada. It was only in the later 1960s, largely because of the success with which Weaver had introduced stories to radio audiences, that publishers once again began accepting collections and finding that willing readerships existed.

Once Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades appeared in 1968, her acceptance by Canadian readers was assured, and her later volumes were successful not only in Canada, but also in the United States, where the marginal agrarian communities she portrayed were recognized as familiar, and where reviewers, ignorant of other Canadian writers, almost automatically compared her with American analogues like John Cheever and Joyce Carol Oates. In fact, like Al Purdy with his poetic rendering of the "degenerate Loyalist" heritage of Ameliasburgh and thereabouts, Munro offers the portrait of a distinctively Canadian society and does it in a distinctively Canadian way. Her sense of the interplay of setting and tradition is impeccable, so that there are really two ways of reading Munro, the exoteric one of the reader who knows a good story when he comes upon it, and reads it with enjoyment and not too much concern for authenticity, and the esoteric one of the Canadian who is likely to read it with a special sense of its truth or otherwise to the life and land he knows.

Perhaps because, unlike the later collections of stories, it is gathered from the writings of a relatively long period—at least fifteen years as against three or four—The Dance of the Happy Shades is more varied and tentatively venturesome than the later volumes. It shows the author trying out different modes and approaches. There are stories, like "The Office," that rather self-consciously explore the problems of women setting out as writers in an unsympathetic environment. There are others, like "The Shining Houses," a study of the callousness young property owners can show in defending their "values" (i.e. the selling prices of their homes), that are as ambivalently suburban as anything by John Cheever. "Sunday Afternoon" is a little social study, highly class-conscious for a Canadian writer, of the relations between a country girl hired to serve in a rich middle-class home and her brittle-brainless employers. And in "Thanks for the Ride" Munro makes a rare foray across the sex line and tells in the voice of an adolescent boy the story of his first lay; in fact, the point of view is deceptive, since the real interest of the story lies in the portrait of his partner Lois, a fragile yet tough working-class girl, much used by men and yet—in her coarse independence—strangely inviolate.

Most of the remaining stories fall into a group of which the main theme is childhood and growing up in the Ontario countryside, with action centred sometimes on the farm operated by the father of the central character and sometimes in the nearby town where the mother at times lives separately and where the girl attends school. The father-dominated farm represents the world of nature and feeling, a world devoid of ambition. The mother-dominated house in town represents the world of social and intellectual ambition, just as the school is the setting where the heroine establishes her relationship with her peers among the small-town children but also develops her desire to escape into a broader world. In some of the stories the mother, living or remembered, is shown advancing into the illness—Parkinson's disease—that will accentuate the oddity which most of her neighbours have already mocked in her.

The three stories of childhood, "Walker Brothers Cowboy," "Image" and "Boys and Girls," are perhaps the most important of this group, both for their vivid evocation of the decaying rural life a century after the pioneers of Upper Canada, and for their delineation of the relationships between parents and children in hard times.

"Walker Brothers Cowboy," the opening story of the book, takes us to a time when the silver fox farm has failed and Ben Jordan has taken up peddling the patent medicines, spices and food flavourings distributed by Walker Brothers. The story, told by his daughter who does not name herself, begins by relating this time of stress and need to the slightly better past on the farm. The girl's mother, also unnamed, tries desperately to maintain self-respect in a situation she sees as a demeaning loss of social standing, even though she lives physically better in the town than on the farm.

Fate has flung us onto a street of poor people (it does not matter that we were poor before, that was a different kind of poverty), and the only way to take this, as she sees it, is with dignity, with bitterness, with no reconciliation. No bathroom with claw-footed tub and a flush toilet is going to comfort her, nor water on tap and sidewalks past the house and milk in bottles, nor even the two movie theatres and the Venus Restaurant and Woolworths so marvellous it has live birds singing in its fan-cooled corners and fish as tiny as finger-nails, as bright as moons, swimming in its green tanks. My mother does not care.

The father, more self-contained, more ironic, finds ways to live with Depression conditions and salvage his pride. As the story opens we see him walking with his daughter beside Lake Huron and telling her how the Great Lakes were gouged out of the earth by the ice coming down in great probing fingers from the north. Clearly the girl prefers her father's company to her mother's:

She walks serenely like a lady shopping, like a lady shopping, past the housewives in loose beltless dresses torn under the arms. With me her creation, wretched curls and flaunting hair bow, scrubbed knees and white socks—all I do not want to be. I loathe even my name when she says it in public, in a voice so high, proud and ringing, deliberately different from the voice of any other mother on the street.

Travelling his route of the desperate dusty farmlands, Ben Jordan makes fun of his situation by improvising as he rides a kind of endless ballad of his adventures on the road, and this becomes a kind of leitmotiv one day when he sets out with the girl and her brother and, leaving his Walker Brothers territory, takes them to a farmhouse where a woman who was once his sweetheart is living. The clean bare farmhouse with Catholic emblems on the walls and an old woman dozing in a corner becomes a kind of stage on which is revealed to the girl that people we know may have dimensions to their lives of which to this point we have been unaware. The sense of something theatrical and unreal and different from ordinary life is given by the fact that Ben Jordan and his old sweetheart Nora Cronin name each other, but nobody else in the story is named. The strangeness of the hitherto unknown past is framed within the nameless ordinariness of the present.

In "Image" a different kind of framing takes place. The story begins with the girl, again unnamed and again mainly a spectator, remembering the coarse cousin, Mary McQuade, who comes in to act as a kind of nurse in family crises and who is now filling the house with her overbearing presence because the mother is ill. The father—once again Ben Jordan but now an unspecified farmer—runs a trapline down by the river, and one day he and the girl go down to harvest the muskrats. On their way they encounter a crazy recluse, Joe Phippen, who patrols the river bank with an axe in search of imagined enemies. They go to the cellar where Joe has been living since his house burnt down; for the girl it seems like an underground playhouse, except for its sinister smells and a mad cat the hermit feeds whisky. As they leave the cellar Ben Jordan cautions the girl when she gets back to tell nobody in the house about the axe. At table with Mary McQuade he relates the story of Joe and his drunken cat, and Mary is filled with indignation.

"A man that'd do a thing like that ought to be locked up."

"Maybe so," my father said. "Just the same I hope they don't get him for a while yet. Old Joe."

"Eat your supper," Mary said, bending over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. "Look at her," she said. "Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she's been and seen. Was he feeding whisky to her too?"

"Not a drop," said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after—like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.

In this story the filial link is complete. The father puts his trust in his daughter, and she keeps it in a kind of complicity to protect the strange and eccentric and unpopular in human behaviour—a complicity that will re-emerge in Munro's fiction.

But in "Boys and Girls" the trust between father and daughter is broken, and that is one of the complex aspects of growing up, involving as it does the girl's gradual realization of the difference between the sexes that in the end, and no matter what Freud may have said, makes fathers see sons as their successors and makes men stand together.

The action of this story takes place entirely on the fox farm. In a passage of admirably clear and restrained description Munro creates the feeling of the place and details the daily tasks the girl performs as she helps her father, keeping the pens supplied with water and spreading grass over them to prevent the foxes' pelts from being darkened by sunlight. Her little brother also helps, but she jealously guards the main tasks for herself, and resents her mother's attempts to trap her into household tasks. The curiously detached centre of all this activity is formed by the foxes which, despite generations of captivity, have not ceased to be wild animals, hostile and intractable:

Naming them did not make pets out of them, or anything like it. Nobody but my father ever went into the pens, and he had twice had blood-poisoning from bites. When I was bringing them their water they prowled up and down on the paths they had made inside their pens, barking seldom—they saved that for nighttime, when they might get up a chorus of community frenzy—but always watching me, their eyes burning, clear gold, in their pointed malevolent faces. They were beautiful for their delicate legs and heavy, aristocratic tails and the bright fur sprinkled on dark down their backs—which gave them their name—but especially for their faces, drawn exquisitely sharp in pure hostility, and their golden eyes.

One has the sense that although loyalty to her father would never let her admit the thought, these wild captive creatures have earned the girl's sympathy, and what happens shortly afterwards seems to confirm this. She begins all at once to realize that her cherished position in the little world of the farm has become insecure:

This winter also I began to hear a great deal more on the theme my mother had sounded when she had been talking in front of the barn. I no longer felt safe. It seemed that in the minds of the people around me there was a steady undercurrent of thought, not to be deflected, on this one subject. The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened, like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me….

The critical point comes shortly afterwards, when her loyalties are all at once tested, and her response is as astonishing to her as it is to anyone else. Her father buys superannuated horses to slaughter for fox food; occasionally there will be a perfectly healthy animal among them for which in these days of increasing mechanization a farmer no longer has any use. A mare of this kind, whom they call Flora, is bought and kept over winter. She is a nervous animal, in some ways almost as proud and intractable as the foxes, and on the day she is being taken out to be shot she breaks away into a meadow where a gate has been left open. The girl and her brother are sent to close it.

The gate was heavy. I lifted it out of the gravel and carried it across the roadway. I had it halfway across when she came into sight, galloping straight towards me. There was just time to get the chain on. Laird came scrambling through the ditch to help me.

Instead of shutting the gate, I opened it as wide as I could. I did not make any decision to do this, it was just what I did. Flora never slowed down; she galloped straight past me, and Laird jumped up and down, yelling, "Shut it, shut it" even when it was too late….

The mare, of course, is eventually caught and killed. And then, at mid-day dinner, her brother Laird tells on the girl:

My father made a curt sound of disgust. "What did you do that for?"

I did not answer. I put down my fork and waited to be sent from the table, still not looking up.

But this did not happen. For some time nobody said anything, then Laird said matter-of-factly, "She's crying."

"Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humour, the words that absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he said.

I didn't protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true.

Two themes that will recur in Munro's later writing have been introduced; the burden of femininity, and the need to break free. They take on increased importance in her first novel, Lives of Girls and Women. This appears to have begun as another collection of stories that had enough of a common strain for the publisher to suggest she might turn them into a novel; its origin survives in the episodic and rather discontinuous structure of the work.

Lives of Girls and Women really completes the three stories I have just been discussing. The inconsistencies that existed between them are ironed out. Ben Jordan is still the father and he runs a fox farm. The other characters are now all named, the girl becoming Della (or Del), the mother Ida, the brother changing to Owen, and with this naming everything seems to become more precise in intent. Even the locality is named, for the farm is on Flats Road in the disreputable outskirts of the town of Jubilee, and the action alternates between the farm and the town, where Ida takes a house where she and Del live except in the summer months.

The eight parts (significantly they are named but not numbered, so that they seem as much stories as chapters) really serve two functions. Each is an exemplary episode, self-contained even though its characters spill over into the other episodes, so that it can stand on its own. Yet, in the classic manner of the Bildungsroman, each episode builds on the last, revealing another side of Del's education in life, and as the progression is generally chronological, the continuity becomes that of a rather conventional novel, which begins in the heroine's childhood and ends when, as a young woman who has just allowed a love affair to divert her from winning a scholarship, she turns to the world of art and begins her first book.

The general inclination of Lives of Girls and Women is indeed that of a portrait of the artist, and the first-person voice in which it is told is appropriate. It looks back to the final and title story of Dance of the Happy Shades, which tells of the last party of an old music teacher who astonishes and annoys her middle-class pupils and their parents by producing a girl from a school for the retarded who is clearly, whatever her intelligence, something near to a musical genius:

Miss Marsalles sits beside the piano and smiles at everybody in her usual way. Her smile is not triumphant, or modest. She does not look like a magician who is watching people's faces to see the effect of a rather original revelation; nothing like that. You would think, now that at the very end of her life she has found someone she can teach—whom she must teach—to play the piano, she would light up with the importance of this discovery. But it seems that the girl's playing like this is something she always expected, and she finds it natural and satisfying; people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one. Nor does it seem that she regards this girl with any more wonder than the other children from Greenhill School, who love her, or the rest of us, who do not. To her no gift is unexpected, no celebration will come as a surprise.

The sense of art as a miracle, and the sense also of some special kind of intelligence that recognizes it recurs in Munro's books, and it is linked with the idea that there are levels of access to truth which have nothing to do with what in the world passes for wisdom or intelligence.

This is shown quite clearly in the first chapter—or story—of Lives of Girls and Women, "The Flats Road," where the central character is an eccentric, Uncle Benny, who lives in a house full of junk on the edge of the bush and works as a hired man on Ben Jordan's fox farm:

Probably the reason he kept on working for my father, though he had never worked steadily at any other job, was that my father raised silver foxes, and there was in such a business something precarious and some glamorous and ghostly, never realized, hope of fortune.

It is through Uncle Benny that Del and her brother begin to learn the perilous wonders of the natural world, represented by the great bog with its ravenous quicksands that stretches beyond his home; it is through him that they begin to recognize the inexpressible strangeness of human relations, represented by his disastrous adventure with a mail-order wife:

So lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny's world like a troubling reflection, the same, but never at all the same. In that world people could go down in quicksand, be vanquished by ghosts or terrible ordinary cities; luck and wickedness were gigantic and unpredictable; nothing was deserved, anything might happen; defeats were met with crazy satisfaction. It was his triumph, that he couldn't know about, to make us see.

Through the remaining chapters of Lives of Girls and Women runs the recurrent theme of people who, whether they intend or know it, "make us see." In "Heirs of the Living Body" it is the old great-aunts preserving a model of the idealized Victorian Ontario farm life as they provide for their brother, Uncle Craig, who spends his time writing a vast prosaic chronicle of the history of his district. When he dies, his sisters give Del his manuscript, remarking: "He had the gift. He could get everything in and still make it read smooth." And ironically, though Del rejects Uncle Craig's manuscript by losing it, this is what her narrative seeks to do, to get everything in that is of importance, and to "make it read smooth"—the realist's ambition.

In other chapters her mother's intellectual restlessness, her own search for a faith that seems to meet her poetic expectations of religion, and the frenetic dedication to a parody of art which inspires the hysterically flamboyant teacher Miss Farris who produces the school operetta every year (and having lived to the limit of her own style commits suicide), are all stages on the path to self-realization and to realization of the true nature of the world along which Del is proceeding. So in the strangely poised title chapter, "Lives of Girls and Women," Del's sexual fantasies about middle-aged Mr Chamberlain come to a climax in more ways than one when he takes her out to the country and masturbates in her presence. It could have been a shocking and traumatic experience, but Del takes it in her ironic stride, already at heart the observer-writer to whom everything is grist to the mill. This comes out at the end of the chapter, when her mother makes the statement that gives chapter and book their common title:

There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals….

It sounds like a good feminist statement until, talking of "self-respect," Ida Jordan makes it clear—at least in Del's mind—that she is talking about the caution and calculation which "being female" must impose on women,

Whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same.

And this is precisely what Del attempts, becoming involved in a love affair with a fervent young Baptist, being so submerged emotionally as to lose the scholarship her brilliance at school has led her to expect, but retaining enough of a will to reject finally his desire to overpower her mentally as well as sexually; resisting his attempt to baptize her forcibly, she brings their relationship to an end.

Her love burnt out, her scholarly ambitions abandoned, Del turns to the writing she has dabbled with over the years, and sets about composing a highly Gothic novel about a Jubilee family all of whose children have ended tragically, in suicide or madness. And then, by chance, she meets one of the sons, recently released from his mental home, and finds how false her perceptions have been, like the distortions of a bad photographer. Writing, she decides, must be true to the spirit of what it portrays, to its often unsensational reality. And it is in this realization, we are free to assume, though Munro never says it directly, that Del has written the book we have just read.

If one reads it in connection with the earlier stories to which it is so closely linked, Lives of Girls and Women is a remarkable achievement both in human understanding and in technical prowess, presenting a psychologically and emotionally convincing episodic narrative of a questing child's development into a young woman on the edge of artistic achievement, and using a quasidocumentary form so effectively that we are always aware of the imagination shaping and illuminating the gifts of an obviously vivid memory.

The second novel, Who Do You Think You Are?, is a much less convincing book than Lives of Girls and Women, in both emotional and aesthetic terms. It too is a Bildungsroman, extending well beyond childhood into the darker times of middle age with its failed marriages, humiliating love affairs and mundane careers. The story of Rose, her upbringing in the rural slum of West Hanratty, and her subsequent and doomed marriage to a rich fellow student, develops the theme of social climbing and its perils that is already present in Lives of Girls and Women. The novel, again a series of loosely connected episodes, is written in the third person, and this shift in point of view accompanies—perhaps even creates—a notable change in tone from the earlier book. In Lives of Girls and Women the sense of familiar authenticity was sustained by the fact that the aspirant writer as central character was assumed to be both participant and observer. In Who Do You Think You Are? the participant is observed, and there is a kind of hard objectivity to the book with its relentless social documentation of low life in West Hanratty at the end of the Thirties. Though Munro does make a largely successful attempt to project the inner life of her principal character, the other leading figures in the novel, like Rose's crotchety stepmother Flo, her violent father and her snobbish husband, are shallow projections, almost caricatures, portrayed with none of the feeling and understanding that characterized the presentation of the father and mother, Ben and Ida Jordan, in the earlier novel.

Yet, though the general tone of Who Do You Think You Are? is at once harsher and more brittle than that of Lives of Girls and Women, there is a variation of quality within the book, and the first four chapters, which deal with childhood in Ontario, are the most effective. When the action moves into other places, notably the alien realm of British Columbia, the documentary background becomes more uncertain, and as Munro deals with the problems of adults living out their erotic fantasies she seems too near her subject for the special kind of luminous objectivity that characterizes the stories of childhood and adolescence to develop.

A similar criticism applies to the later stories contained in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You and The Moons of Jupiter. Reading them, one becomes aware how little Munro has changed as a writer since the early period of the 1950s and the 1960s when she first attracted the attention of readers. She is still at her best as the magic realist. She has not moved, like so many of her contemporaries, into fantasy, or into an experimental use of memory like that of Margaret Laurence, while the episodic and open-ended form of her so-called novels arises not from any deconstructionist intent, but, I suggest, from the kind of perception that sees life discontinuously, episode by episode.

In making these remarks I do not mean to suggest that the later stories are unimpressive. They are always skillful in their presentation of human situations, and the prose never falters. There is not a sloppily written piece among them. As studies of generational distancing, some of the stories seen from the viewpoint of old people, like "Walking on Water" and "Marrakesh," are entirely convincing, while here and there are still marvelously lucid evocations of childhood and adolescence like "The Found Boat" and "The Turkey Season." Much less satisfying are the stories of middle-aged women with elusive lovers, and here the very impeccability of the writing seems to emphasize the psychological hollowness. At times, in recent years, one feels that Munro has fallen into the trap of virtuosity. She is so good at the kind of story she has always written that she seems never to have felt the need to try anything different. The result has been a certain leaching of character from her writing; some of her later stories are so well made that they seem anonymous, like those New Yorker stories which might have been written by any one of a number of North American virtuosi; indeed, the Munro stories of which this seems especially true, like "Dulse" and "Labour Day Dinner" in The Moons of Jupiter, in fact appeared in the New Yorker.

I am conscious, remembering what I expected of Munro when I first read her early stories and Lives of Girls and Women, of a disappointment with her career seen as a whole. Most of her early stories and some of the later ones are among the best ever written in Canada. But those whom we think of as major writers, while they do not necessarily evolve in the sense of becoming always better, do tend to metamorphose and so indefinitely to enlarge their scope, as poets like Earle Birney and Dorothy Livesay and novelists like Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley have done. In this respect Alice Munro has remained fundamentally unchanged, applying the same realist techniques with the same impeccable skill and merely varying the human situations. Her potentialities have always been major; her achievements have never quite matched them because she has never mastered those transformations of form with which major writers handle the great climactic shifts of life. She has written of all the ages as she first wrote of childhood, and that is why her lives of girls are so much more convincing than her lives of women.