Alices Wonderland.docx

1、Alices WonderlandAlices WonderlandBy Jonathan FranzenPublished: November 14, 2004RUNAWAYBy Alice Munro.Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership. At

2、 the risk of sounding like a pleader on behalf of yet another underappreciated writer - and maybe youve learned to recognize and evade these pleas? The same way youve learned not to open bulk mail from certain charities? Please give generously to Dawn Powell? Your contribution of just 15 minutes a w

3、eek can help assure Joseph Roth of his rightful place in the modern canon? - I want to circle around Munros latest marvel of a book, Runaway, by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.1. Munros work is all about storytelling pleasure. The problem here being that ma

4、ny buyers of serious fiction seem rather ardently to prefer lyrical, tremblingly earnest, faux-literary stuff.2. As long as youre reading Munro, youre failing to multitask by absorbing civics lessons or historical data. Her subject is people. People people people. If you read fiction about some enri

5、ching subject like Renaissance art or an important chapter in our nations history, you can be assured of feeling productive. But if the story is set in the modern world, and if the characters concerns are familiar to you, and if you become so involved with a book that you cant put it down at bedtime

6、, there exists a risk that youre merely being entertained.3. She doesnt give her books grand titles like Canadian Pastoral, Canadian Psycho, Purple Canada, In Canada or The Plot Against Canada. Also, she refuses to render vital dramatic moments in convenient discursive summary. Also, her rhetorical

7、restraint and her excellent ear for dialogue and her almost pathological empathy for her characters have the costly effect of obscuring her authorial ego for many pages at a stretch. Also, her jacket photos show her smiling pleasantly, as if the reader were a friend, rather than wearing the kind of

8、woeful scowl that signifies really serious literary intent.4. The Swedish Royal Academy is taking a firm stand. Evidently, the feeling in Stockholm is that too many Canadians and too many pure short-story writers have already been given the Nobel. Enough is enough!5. Munro writes fiction, and fictio

9、n is harder to review than nonfiction. Heres Bill Clinton, hes written a book about himself, and how interesting. How interesting. The author himself is interesting - can there be a better qualification for writing a book about Bill Clinton than actually being Bill Clinton? - and then, too, everybod

10、y has an opinion about Bill Clinton and wonders what Bill Clinton says and doesnt say in his new book about himself, and how Bill Clinton spins this and refutes that, and before you know it the review has practically written itself.But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely plea

11、surable private experiences. And since Im not interested in reviewing her new books marketing campaign or in being entertainingly snarky at her expense, and since Im reluctant to talk about the concrete meaning of her new work, because this is difficult to do without revealing too much plot, Im prob

12、ably better off just serving up a nice quote for Alfred A. Knopf to pull - Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. Runaway is a marvel - and suggesting to the Book Reviews editors that they run the biggest possible photograph of Munro in the most promi

13、nent of places, plus a few smaller photos of mildly prurient interest (her kitchen? her children?) and maybe a quote from one of her rare interviews - Because there is this kind of exhaustion and bewilderment when you look at your work. . . . All you really have left is the thing youre working on no

14、w. And so youre much more thinly clothed. Youre like somebody out in a little shirt or something, which is just the work youre doing now and the strange identification with everything youve done before. And this probably is why I dont take any public role as a writer. Because I cant see myself doing

15、 that except as a gigantic fraud - and just leave it at that.6. Because, worse yet, Munro is a pure short-story writer. And with short stories the challenge to reviewers is even more extreme. Is there a story in all of world literature whose appeal can survive the typical synopsis? (A chance meeting

16、 on a boardwalk in Yalta brings together a bored husband and a lady with a little dog. . . . A small towns annual lottery is revealed to serve a rather surprising purpose. . . . A middle-aged Dubliner leaves a party and reflects on life and love. . . .) Oprah Winfrey will not touch story collections

17、. Discussing them is so challenging, indeed, that one can almost forgive this Book Reviews former editor, Charles McGrath, for his recent comparison of young short-story writers to people who learn golf by never venturing onto a golf course but instead practicing at a driving range. The real game be

18、ing, by this analogy, the novel.McGraths prejudice is shared by nearly all commercial publishers, for whom a story collection is, most frequently, the distasteful front-end write-off in a two-book deal whose back end is contractually forbidden to be another story collection. And yet, despite the sho

19、rt storys Cinderella status, or maybe because of it, a high percentage of the most exciting fiction written in the last 25 years - the stuff I immediately mention if somebody asks me whats terrific - has been short fiction. Theres the Great One herself, naturally. Theres also Lydia Davis, David Mean

20、s, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel and the late Raymond Carver - all of them pure or nearly pure short-story writers - and then a larger group of writers who have achievements in multiple genres (John Updike, Joy Williams, David Foster Wallace, Joyce Carol Oates, Denis Johnson, Ann Beattie

21、, William T. Vollmann, Tobias Wolff, Annie Proulx, Michael Chabon, Tom Drury, the late Andre Dubus) but who seem to me most at home, most undilutedly themselves, in their shorter work. There are also, to be sure, some very fine pure novelists. But when I close my eyes and think about literature in r

22、ecent decades, I see a twilight landscape in which many of the most inviting lights, the sites that beckon me to return for a visit, are shed by particular short stories Ive read.I like stories because they leave the writer no place to hide. Theres no yakking your way out of trouble; Im going to be

23、reaching the last page in a matter of minutes, and if youve got nothing to say Im going to know it. I like stories because theyre usually set in the present or in living memory; the genre seems to resist the historical impulse that makes so many contemporary novels feel fugitive or cadaverous. I lik

24、e stories because it takes the best kind of talent to invent fresh characters and situations while telling the same story over and over. All fiction writers suffer from the condition of having nothing new to say, but story writers are the ones most abjectly prone to this condition. There is, again,

25、no hiding. The craftiest old dogs, like Munro and William Trevor, dont even try.HERES the story that Munro keeps telling: A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the g

26、irl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self-interested act. She marries young, moves to British Columbia, raises kids, and is far from blameless in the breakup of her marriage. She may have success as an actress or a writer or a TV personality;

27、she has romantic adventures. When, inevitably, she returns to Ontario, she finds the landscape of her youth unsettlingly altered. Although she was the one who abandoned the place, its a great blow to her narcissism that she isnt warmly welcomed back - that the world of her youth, with its older-fash

28、ioned manners and mores, now sits in judgment on the modern choices she has made. Simply by trying to survive as a whole and independent person, she has incurred painful losses and dislocations; she has caused harm.And thats pretty much it. Thats the little stream thats been feeding Munros work for

29、better than 50 years. The same elements recur and recur like Clare Quilty. What makes Munros growth as an artist so crisply and breathtakingly visible - throughout the Selected Stories and even more so in her three latest books - is precisely the familiarity of her materials. Look what she can do wi

30、th nothing but her own small story; the more she returns to it, the more she finds.This is not a golfer on a practice tee. This is a gymnast in a plain black leotard, alone on a bare floor, outperforming all the novelists with their flashy costumes and whips and elephants and tigers.The complexity o

31、f things - the things within things - just seems to be endless, Munro told her interviewer. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.SHE was stating the fundamental axiom of literature, the core of its appeal. And, for whatever reason - the fragmentation of my reading time, the distractions and ato

32、mizations of contemporary life or, perhaps, a genuine paucity of compelling novels - I find that when Im in need of a hit of real writing, a good stiff drink of paradox and complexity, Im likeliest to encounter it in short fiction. Besides Runaway, the most compelling contemporary fiction Ive read in recent months has been Wallaces stories in Oblivion and a stunner of a collection by the British writer Helen Simpson. Simpsons book, a series of comic shrieks on the subject of modern motherhood, was published originally as