Ordinary miracle ... Alice Munro. Photograph: PR
Hopefully, the Booker means the broadest possible audience will now know about the greatest short story writer in the world
News of Alice Munro's Booker International prize win is sure to be greeted among the literary community with unusually unanimous approval, an appropriately polite, consensual sigh of "At last!"
There is nothing tricksy about Munro's fiction – she's a good old-fashioned storyteller, things happen, lives change, or don't, decisions are made, or not, but the characters are always altered in some profound sense. Her stories are unexpected in unexpected ways. There is nothing "lyrical" about her prose – her writing is as scrubbed and unadorned as a wooden table, but contains knots of great complexity and beauty. She is never going to write a great state-of-the-nation novel (it seems unlikely that she will ever write a novel at all): almost all her stories are small-town dramas, firmly rooted in the flat horizons of her native South-west Ontario; many of her characters, like the author herself, leave only to return home. She does not write about Big Ideas, Politics or History. And while there is a great deal of desire, infidelity and frustration in her fiction (she is often claimed as one of her era's great documenters of female sexuality) you will find very little out-and-out sex. There is, in short, nothing fashionable about her work. And yet despite all this, slowly, steadily, almost by stealth, at 77 Alice Munro has become one of the most esteemed writers in the world – as this international accolade acknowledges.
While admirers such as Margaret Atwood and AS Byatt have long been forceful advocates of Munro's stories, a younger generation of writers has recently joined the cult of Munro: you might expect a relative hipster like Jonathan Franzen, for example, to be more in thrall to the noisier attractions of the Big American Men, but it is Munro he calls "The Great One". And yet, until today at least, Alice Munro has remained something of a paradox: while critics and fellow authors have fallen over themselves to crown her "the greatest living short story writer", they have also formed a chorus lamenting her obscurity and lack of recognition. She is the secret everyone likes to shout about – and yet she somehow retains her secret status. As Atwood puts it,"It's as if she jumps out of a cake – Surprise! – and then has to jump out of it again, and then again."
This lack of recognition and wider readership is blamed on Munro's dedication to genre and her subject matter. To take the first charge: Munro writes very long short stories (sometimes up to 60 pages), occasionally interlinked, with characters reappearing throughout a collection. It has become commonplace to observe that her stories embrace whole lives as effortlessly as any novel: like a capacious handbag, a Munro story expands almost magically to contain not only all the necessary details and detritus of daily life but the secret history of its owner. And Munro's fiction is undoubtedly drenched in domesticity, the drudgery and small miracles of the everyday. "People's lives were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum," as she writes in The Lives of Girls and Women.
Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness – and joy – of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro. She writes so directly, so honestly (sometimes shockingly so) about "ordinary life", which is, of course, anything but, that it is easy to overlook how extraordinary her stories are. But it is impossible to ignore the bolt of recognition, the sense that she is revealing almost unspeakable intimacies just to you. It is this, perhaps, that makes every Munro reader feel that they are indeed discovering something for the first time. And it is this, of course, that qualifies her stories as Great Literature, but that sounds obvious and pompous and Munro is never either.
In the week that Jhumpa Lahiri has won Italy's most prestigious foreign fiction prize, the Premio Vallombrosa, for her story collection Unaccustomed Earth, and in a publishing season when several of the most warmly received releases have been story collections, it seems the form might finally have cast off its Cinderella slippers. It is a pleasing irony that the writer who has generally been excluded from the Booker prize itself (Claire Tomalin, a judge in 1980, insisted that she be included on the shortlist), should pull the really big one. It is also gratifying that a writer who has spent many decades creating a fictional landscape out of life in a weather-beaten corner of Canada should be so internationally acclaimed. From today she will simply be "the greatest short story writer in the world" – and everyone will know about it. At last!
There is nothing tricksy about Munro's fiction – she's a good old-fashioned storyteller, things happen, lives change, or don't, decisions are made, or not, but the characters are always altered in some profound sense. Her stories are unexpected in unexpected ways. There is nothing "lyrical" about her prose – her writing is as scrubbed and unadorned as a wooden table, but contains knots of great complexity and beauty. She is never going to write a great state-of-the-nation novel (it seems unlikely that she will ever write a novel at all): almost all her stories are small-town dramas, firmly rooted in the flat horizons of her native South-west Ontario; many of her characters, like the author herself, leave only to return home. She does not write about Big Ideas, Politics or History. And while there is a great deal of desire, infidelity and frustration in her fiction (she is often claimed as one of her era's great documenters of female sexuality) you will find very little out-and-out sex. There is, in short, nothing fashionable about her work. And yet despite all this, slowly, steadily, almost by stealth, at 77 Alice Munro has become one of the most esteemed writers in the world – as this international accolade acknowledges.
While admirers such as Margaret Atwood and AS Byatt have long been forceful advocates of Munro's stories, a younger generation of writers has recently joined the cult of Munro: you might expect a relative hipster like Jonathan Franzen, for example, to be more in thrall to the noisier attractions of the Big American Men, but it is Munro he calls "The Great One". And yet, until today at least, Alice Munro has remained something of a paradox: while critics and fellow authors have fallen over themselves to crown her "the greatest living short story writer", they have also formed a chorus lamenting her obscurity and lack of recognition. She is the secret everyone likes to shout about – and yet she somehow retains her secret status. As Atwood puts it,"It's as if she jumps out of a cake – Surprise! – and then has to jump out of it again, and then again."
This lack of recognition and wider readership is blamed on Munro's dedication to genre and her subject matter. To take the first charge: Munro writes very long short stories (sometimes up to 60 pages), occasionally interlinked, with characters reappearing throughout a collection. It has become commonplace to observe that her stories embrace whole lives as effortlessly as any novel: like a capacious handbag, a Munro story expands almost magically to contain not only all the necessary details and detritus of daily life but the secret history of its owner. And Munro's fiction is undoubtedly drenched in domesticity, the drudgery and small miracles of the everyday. "People's lives were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum," as she writes in The Lives of Girls and Women.
Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness – and joy – of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro. She writes so directly, so honestly (sometimes shockingly so) about "ordinary life", which is, of course, anything but, that it is easy to overlook how extraordinary her stories are. But it is impossible to ignore the bolt of recognition, the sense that she is revealing almost unspeakable intimacies just to you. It is this, perhaps, that makes every Munro reader feel that they are indeed discovering something for the first time. And it is this, of course, that qualifies her stories as Great Literature, but that sounds obvious and pompous and Munro is never either.
In the week that Jhumpa Lahiri has won Italy's most prestigious foreign fiction prize, the Premio Vallombrosa, for her story collection Unaccustomed Earth, and in a publishing season when several of the most warmly received releases have been story collections, it seems the form might finally have cast off its Cinderella slippers. It is a pleasing irony that the writer who has generally been excluded from the Booker prize itself (Claire Tomalin, a judge in 1980, insisted that she be included on the shortlist), should pull the really big one. It is also gratifying that a writer who has spent many decades creating a fictional landscape out of life in a weather-beaten corner of Canada should be so internationally acclaimed. From today she will simply be "the greatest short story writer in the world" – and everyone will know about it. At last!
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