Alice Munro (Contemporary World Writers) by Coral Ann Howells

Alice Munro (Contemporary World Writers) Reviews

• 
  Blake

  In this volume, Coral Ann Howells reads the short stories of Alice Munro with a glance to a critical backdrop that is lucidly Irigarayan and feminine; one that emphasises the female body and knowledge, and 'open secrets'; and is also influenced by Derrida and, moreso, by the writers of the American South, such as one of Munro's own favourites, Eudora Welty, with whom Munro shares a literary heritage and ancestry.
  
  In the opening chapter, Howells offers a critical context for the readings that will follow, drawing on thematic devices of houses and maps and other worlds. And then she reads selected stories from Munro's collections; beginning with stories from Dance of the Happy Shades (Munro's first collection) and proceeding through and up to, the then current collection, Open Secrets, while also looking forward ironically and with a recognition of the openness of Munro's narratives, to The Love of a Good Woman that would proceed it.
  
  In the final chapter, she offers an extremely helpful overview of critical work on Munro; including both standard examples of Munro scholarship and more esoteric works, she also provides explanatory introductions to, and summations of, these works to aid the reader.
  
  Any book of critical work on a writer whose work is varied and rich is bound to be more scholarly than breathing, I think. Howells does well to make connections here and there through careful reading of text and subtext, but there was something just not there for me. To use Howells's (and Munro's) house metaphor to get at my point: Munro's stories are about the life within a house, but Howells's writings, while getting at something important in the structure and architecture of Munro's stories, seem to live in the walls of the house without making it into the living space. Maybe it's that there's just nothing like Munro's direct address (if Munro's address can be called "direct" at all). Or maybe I just want criticism that gets closer to her.
• 
  Joy Pope

  Loved it.