 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||||
Too Much Happiness
by Alice Munro
Toronto: Douglas Gibson
Books at McClelland & Stewart, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7710-6529-3, $32.99 cloth.
"Dimensions," the first of ten stories in Alice Munro's latest collection, Too Much Happiness, focuses on Doree, whose husband Lloyd murders their three young children. With that bare story, Munro plots and weaves together various strands in her unique way of unfolding past and present, layering her sequences into a satisfying whole. Doree has to take three buses to get to London where Lloyd remains in custody at a "facility." Three buses, her third trip, and three children create a trinitarian symmetry in the story, which contrasts with Lloyd's demented murders. Munro's magic realism both reconciles and unsettles the tenuous relationship between accidents and regional routines that run through much of her fiction. In other words, the proximity between "dementia" and "dimensions" in Munro's work is not accidental: it is germane to the gothic nature of her writing.Nowhere is that gothic element more in evidence than in the breaks or pauses or spaces between sections of her stories. The hiatus is the arch in her architecture, allowing the reader to pause before the transition to the next section. The reader's response takes shape during these breathing spaces, so that Munro's sections become the prose equivalents of stanzas in poetry. While Munro's journeys transport us through regions and time zones, we are constantly reminded that "words" are her vehicles. On the bus, Doree plays word games with advertising signs: "Words were more than plentiful on the way out of the city, as they passed billboards."
Sunday's routine in the first section gives way to Monday's session with Mrs. Sands, a social worker who consoles Doree: "I know these words have been done to death . . . But they're still true." Munro's self-reflexive "words" place her within a postmodern tradition that looks back to a somewhat old-fashioned, rural Ontario earlier in the twentieth century. Her domestic interiors may be interpreted through layers of wallpaper, each layer containing its own history. More broadly, this layering or palimpsest characterizes the history and structure of each short story, where epiphanies may either crop up near the middle or remain suspended until the very end.
Even within a section there may be a sudden flashback, a dislocation in the lives of the characters that snaps the reader to attention. In the midst of the conversation between Doree and Mrs. Sands, the narrator turns to the past: "When Doree was sixteen--that was seven years ago--she'd gone to visit her mother in the hospital every day after school." This flashback allows us to register that Doree has had three children by the age of 23, but more importantly, Munro compresses those missing seven years into a page and a half of historical background where Doree and Lloyd get married and move across the country from British Columbia to Ontario. The section that begins with Doree's mother's death ends with the birth of her first child Sasha, and this cycle is picked up again in the next section, where Mrs. Sands resumes with the words "perfectly natural." Repetitions and cyclical patterns round out the "dimensions" in all of her stories, so that despite the compressed nature of her chosen genre, Munro manages to enlarge her canvas to the three-dimensional structure more characteristic of a novel.
Varied points of view and punctuation add to the multi-dimensional nature of Munro's fiction. The narrator reports "objectively" on Doree's discovery of her murdered children: "Dmitri still in his crib, lying sideways. Barbara Ann on the floor beside her bed, as if she'd got out or been pulled out. Sasha by the kitchen door--he had tried to get away. He was the only one with bruises on his throat. The pillow had done for the others." Lloyd's insanity and Doree's shock are missing from this domestic picture gone awry, but the aftershock soon registers. "Doree had run out of the house and was stumbling around the yard, holding her arms tight across her stomach as if she had been sliced open and was trying to keep herself together." For some time she stuffs her mouth with dirt, grass, sheets, or towels, as if "she were to stifle not just the howls that rose up but the scene in her head."
When she visits Lloyd in prison, he appears like a ghost or a character in a dream. He writes her a letter explaining that he has had a vision of their dead children: "they do exist and it must be there in another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions." By the end of the story, Doree is travelling once again on the bus when she witnesses an accident: "the driver of the truck flying though the air in a manner that seemed both swift and slow, absurd and graceful." These contradictory adjectives summarize the story, as Doree saves the driver's life through artificial respiration; and this resurrection universalizes the Trinitarian "Dimensions."
The second story, "Fiction," lies on the edge of postmodernism and explores the twists and turns of divorce--a recurrent theme in Munro's oeuvre. The geographic split between Ontario and British Columbia further highlights the nature of her Canadian separations, as do the textual breaks--a kind of structural split. Jon and Joyce are the couple in question, and the story opens with Joyce driving home after her day teaching music in Rough River schools. Again, the tense gives the sense of both routine and estrangement--the sudden twist of fate that will change the lives of characters in such a brief moment--hence the novel compacted into short story. "It would already be dark, and on the upper streets of the town snow might be falling, while rain lashed the car on the coastal highway." --pathetic fallacy, to be sure, but a more subtle form for bittersweet emotions.
Like Doree, Joyce studies the advertising signs--a semiotics of the blurry mirror along the roadway that both connects to the world and separates the viewer from it. One special thing she loves to see as she turns in to her own property are the patio doors, featured as porches or verandas in Munro's earlier fiction--a liminal space between private interior and the public realm. These theatrical spaces focus on domestic turmoil shared by so many characters. At this time many people . . . were putting in what were called patio doors--even if like Jon and Joyce they had no patio. These were usually left uncurtained, and the two oblongs of light seemed to be a sign or pledge of comfort . . . Why this should be so, more than with ordinary windows, Joyce could not say. Perhaps it was that most were meant not just to look out on but to open directly into the forest darkness, and that they displayed the haven of home so artlessly. Full-length people cooking or watching television--scenes that beguiled her, even if she knew things would not be so special inside. Patio doors highlight the phenomenology of "Fiction" and of Munro's poetics of space in general: they penetrate ordinary domestic patterns, but the combination of monosyllables and double oblongs of light transform that ordinariness into controlled chaos.
Jon, a furniture maker, falls in love with his young assistant, Edie, and Joyce leaves him. By coincidence (and coincidences are often essential for foreshortening the fiction), Edie's daughter, Christie O'Dell, becomes one of Joyce's music students. Joyce remains childless, but Christie serves as her surrogate child. Later in life, Christie writes a book of short stories, How Are We to Live, one of which is titled "Kindertotenlieder," a reference to Mahler's Songs on the Death of Children. Christie had studied music for the love of her teacher, whom she fails to recognize later in life. The fictionality of "Fiction," the box-within-a-box, resurfaces at the very end when the narrator follows Joyce: "Walking up Lonsdale Avenue, walking uphill, she gradually regains her composure. This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell some day. She wouldn't be surprised." The author's bittersweet monosyllables are always a quiet surprise--epiphanies of the ordinary and not so ordinary, for enigma and epiphany are the hallmarks of each story in Too Much Happiness.
Most of the other stories in this collection follow a similar pattern, the notable exception being the last story, "Too Much Happiness," which chronicles the life of Sophia Kovalevsky. We follow Sonia around Europe and Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, as she becomes the first female professor of mathematics at the University of Stockholm. Although she wins the Bordin Prize in mathematics, she is denied a position at any other university because she is a woman. Near the middle of the story a sentence appears, which may be emblematic of the other stories as well: "But there came before long a disturbing surprise." Too Much Happiness is filled with such disturbing surprises.
Michael Greenstein has taught at several universities in Canada and abroad, and is the author of Third Solitudes, as well as numerous articles on Canadian and Victorian literature.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.