Disenchantment of desire

It is hard to think of any great literature which does not have as a theme the relationship between women and men. The subject emerges, as if by accident, in almost every memorable story told. And if women with men, women against men, men against women, men and women without each other and all the cruel, ecstatic, jitterbugging combinations in between constitute essential matter for literature, there is no contemporary writer to have shaped it better (in English, at least) than Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro.

Munro is one of a number of Canadian women writers who have achieved a kind of free-floating international recognition—foremost among them, Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood. What distinguishes this Canadian phenomenon seems, oddly, to be a freedom from questions of national identity, one that even their American counterparts can't match. Writers belonging to that other vast English-speaking landscape, Australia (Peter Carey, David Malouf, Robert Drewe), look like neurotics of nationhood by comparison. The Canadian women remain aloof. Munro, especially, can infuse her stories with an acute sense of place with no need to make a myth out of it.

Nor, in Munro, is there an urge to ape the great, sweeping, American, social novel. Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Kurt Andersen and, most recently, Jonathan Franzen have all foundered on the dizzy incoherence of their panoramas. Munro's answer is not to inflate her vision in the manner of DeLillo's "paranoid fiction," or Salman Rushdie's hectic magical realism. Rather, she gives us a fiction whose abiding characteristic is intimacy. Many of her stories hew close to the bone of her own life. A certain kind of woman—married, then separated, usually with children—recurs in many of them. But her stories never feel constrained by the parameters of autobiography; Munro has too broad a repertoire of characters and types. Her great theme is sex. No one alive writes as well on the vicissitudes—the pleasures and aches—of relations between men and women, nor with such a balance of detachment and compassion.

In male authors who write well about women, we are often aware of a contradiction. John Updike and Philip Roth are capable of drawing on a kind of femininity, and then recoiling from it in dismay or disgust. It can be bracing or shocking, but it feels like a truthful engagement with the violence at the heart of congress between the sexes. Munro manages this tension more effectively still. She shifts, and sows confusion, in her observations of men. She is by turns sympathetic, envious, or thrillingly cruel. She will talk about a woman's ex-lover, who is weak, who will never achieve the impressive masculinity of his father-in-law because: "he will never achieve the steadfastness of control, the decent narrowness of range."

Munro is uninhibited when she writes about the sexual desire of her own sex. In the story "Wild Swans," a teenage girl dreaming on the train about her French teacher "saw him lapping and coiling his way through slow pleasures, a perfect autocrat of indulgences. She had a considerable longing to be somebody's object. Pounded, pleasured, reduced, exhausted." Munro knows all the tangled roles of irreconcilable desire: mistress, lover, diminished husband, frustrated wife. In "Nettles," from the new collection, the adult narrator accompanies her childhood sweetheart around a golf course: "Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back now into a tidy pilot flame, attentive, wifely." Munro turns the diminished "pilot flame" into something buoyant and hopeful, even as the relationship is threatened by adultery.

For Alice Munro, desire is never just unruly and destructive. It is also expansive, creating room for experience. There is nothing strikingly unconventional about Munro's style: there are no flashy runs of adjectives, no eccentric punctuation, no Teutonic, serpentine sentences. It is merely pitch-perfect. The stories fall halfway between the meandering spaciousness of the novel and the soft-pedal epiphanies, or shocking twists, of the narrative short story. Munro wrote one novel, The Beggar Maid, early in her career, but has remained content since then to write short fiction. Raymond Carver, perhaps the only other north American to stick so tenaciously to the form, gave time constraints as his main reason for not writing at greater length. He was, he implied, busy getting on with life, just as Chekhov was busy doctoring and providing for his family. But Munro's stories, unlike Carver's minimalist gems or Borges' intricate totalities, still feel novelistic in their temporal sweep. One gets a sense of full lives lived, trials endured. Munro's brevity is a kind of generosity, allowing the reader to sit up after a single reading session, rub his or her eyes, and then, as Carver put it, get on with "life. Always life."

Like Margaret Atwood, Munro knows her feminist lexicon, but she never insists, never proselytises. She cushions her characters in airy pockets of freedom—or at least that illusion of freedom which seems to go hand in hand with human hopefulness. If it is wisdom Munro offers up through her characters' experiences—their small moments of recognition or understanding—it has a tendency to sink back into the unwisdom of erotic relationships ("Wisdom," as Adam Phillips says, "is always counter-erotic.")

The stories collected in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage are as concerned as ever with the compulsions and incompatibilities of men and women and sex and love. But here it is all thrown into higher relief by a new theme which comes in the form of an intimacy with terminal illness. Each story involves a character who is dying and needs nursing, or has died and needs mourning. Munro maps out the limits of compassion, beyond which those who are close to the dying succumb to disgust and fear or, more sinisterly, pleasure: "as my mother was changed from a mother into a stricken presence around the house these other, formerly so restricted females in the family seemed to gain some little liveliness and increased confidence in the world."

As you edge further into the collection, it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle the surrender of death from sexual surrender. But there is no psychoanalytic schema to Munro's writing, just an appreciation of life's tendency to simplify itself under pressure. Jinny, who has cancer, "knew now that there comes a time when ugly and beautiful serve pretty much the same purpose, when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind." The disenchantment of desire nevertheless feels, in Munro's hand, like life. Always life.