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‘It was about vanishing’: A Glimpse of Alice Munro's Stories

Some writers inspire in critics an awed silence (though rarely, of course, a gleeful contempt), others the most carefully honed and constrained of perspectives. Others still — for me, notably Joyce and Munro — trigger the instinct to reach, perhaps to overreach, to match their constant artistic surprises and their sheer humanity with a critical enterprise that is commensurately abundant and respectful, that spins its own sorts of `tricks' (that signal word from Munro's `Material,' Something, 43) to mirror the ones the writer has been performing with an ever-increasing sense of adventure and gracefulness. To use another of Munro's prime words, the compulsion is to find the broadest `fit' between the interpretation and the fiction. Since a major emphasis of this essay is the extraordinary change in Munro's conception of the later stories, particularly `Carried Away' and `The Love of a Good Woman,' that is initiated by `White Dump,' a change marked by the connection between `vanishing' and the spatial charac...