Month: June 2024

Dear Life, by Alice Munro

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Having recently reread Munro’s first collection of short stories, I was eager to read this, her last. Much is unchanged: the stories are still mostly set in small towns in rural Ontario; many are about women struggling for agency in a conservative culture; and there’s a lot of leaving and returning home.  

What has changed is the depth, a willingness to take on even darker themes, and even more complex characters. “Pride” and “Corrie” feature characters with physical disabilities, exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and class. In other stories, such as “Amundsen” and “Haven,” men inhabit their male privilege without apology, leaving the women in their lives to piece out a life from whatever’s left.

Some of the stories explore aging: a character beginning to experience the onset of dementia (“In Sight of the Lake”), a couple choosing where to end their lives (“Dolly”). Other stories are from a child’s viewpoint. “Gravel” in particular is interesting because the first-person narrator seems to be telling the story of loss and memory as a child. Only later do we come to understand that this is a grown woman looking back.

Whatever their ages, Munro’s people exhibit what one reviewer called “bravery, steadiness and stoic grace.”

As an author, my biggest takeaway from this collection—and indeed from Munro’s entire oeuvre—is to trust the reader. I’m one of those people who likes to fix things. An engineer in my day job, I’m always on the alert for a solution, so I still struggle to remember to ask a distraught friend if they want potential solutions (with a risk analysis of each) or a listening ear. As a result, I sometimes find myself explaining too much to forestall a complaint of I don’t get it or Why did the character do that?

Munro seems to have no such qualms. Much is left unexplained in these stories, leaving some people disgruntled, as a glance at Goodreads shows. What she’s really doing is leaving openings for us as readers to bring our own experiences to the table. Like white space in a poem, these openings encourage us to engage with the story. They force us to interpret for ourselves the actions and motivations of her characters.

At times she is more direct: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

The story that fascinated me most was “Train,” about a soldier returning from the war who, nearing his destination, jumps off the train and walks away. It reminded me of Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years which begins with the protagonist simply walking away from her family on a Delaware beach, a scene which has stayed with me for 28 years.

“Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you going?”

When you walk away from one life, what do you walk into? I imagined him there, holding on for dear life and then letting go.  

The last four pieces are different. She says, “The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

I found them interesting in their own right, seeing the seeds of many stories. As writers, we do take bits of our experience and transform them as only one tessera in the mosaic of a story. We get some hints of her creative process when she describes a neighbour’s house in rural Ontario “… that we would never visit or know and that was to me like a dwarf’s house in a story. But we knew the man who lived there… Roly Grain his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

The choice of what four things to write about also intrigued me. They are a reminder that it’s not necessarily the obvious events, like marriage or having a child, that change and shape you. It could be the small, seemingly trivial events that have made you into the person you are. And thus her choice of subject matter over the course of her career comes into focus: the moments that make a life. And thus life itself. “So immense an enchantment.”

If you were to choose four incidents from your early life that most affected who you are today, what would they be?

Radio Free Vermont, by Bill McKibben

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Subtitled A Fable of Resistance, this is the story of radio personality Vern Barclay’s mission to persuade Vermont to secede from the U. S. Seventy-two years old and dismayed by the speed, greed and corruption that have taken over the country, Vern wants to remind Vermonters of all the things they value that are being lost, not just the slower pace of life, but also local food and the strength of community: Vermont’s “free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors—and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.”

He and his accomplices, the young computer specialist Perry Alterson, his pal Sylvia and an Olympic athlete named Trace, come up with various pranks to drive their point home, starting with a protest at the opening of the first Walmart that backfires, spewing raw sewage into the store. Vern also has hosts a podcast that Perry has set up to use over a dial-up connection to foil their pursuers. The podcast’s motto is “Underground, underfoot and underpowered.”

For Vern, this is more of a thought experiment than a serious endorsement of secession. He mostly wants people to wake up and notice that some good things are slipping away. Still, it fits with the push for secession coming from states like Texas and California.

Humor isn’t that easy to write these days. No matter how much you exaggerate what’s happening in this country, reality shocks you by going even farther. Yet McKibben pulls it off. This zany story is full of fun and surprises, but never quite loses touch with the real world, or a possible version of it.

The satire is softened by the characters who are forthright but pleasant, stubborn but polite. I loved seeing a resistance movement that is not only nonviolent but also positive. It’s focused on building a better future, not just tearing everything down, and demonstrating how to take action, in a friendly way of course.

Funny and thought-provoking, I hope this novel from McKibben is the first of many more. It’s a departure from his many nonfiction books, starting with The End of Nature, in form if not in theme, and must have been a hoot to write.

Have you read any of Bill McKibben’s nonfiction books? Try this novel!

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell

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In my book club’s choice for this month, Lucrezia de’ Medici, third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este, step out of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” and are brought to life by the author of Hamnet.  When her older sister dies suddenly, Lucrezia is forced to take her place in the politically important marriage with Alfonso. Only 16, she is married to him and carried off to Ferrara in 1560. A year later she is dead, rumored to have been poisoned by her husband.

That much is true, though today historians think she died of tuberculosis. O’Farrell expands the story, creating a rich tapestry of the time and a deep dive into a sensitive young woman’s experience. The narrative alternates between the last few months of Lucrezia’s life when Alfonso has removed her from the castello to a remote fortezza, and the fuller story of her life leading up to this ending.

During her childhood in Florence, Lucrezia leads a limited life, confined to the nursery area where she feels different from her many siblings, older and younger. Imaginative and artistic, she has a rich inner life. And she’s a fierce child, pushing against restrictions and yearning to see the tiger her father has had imported for his personal zoo in the lower reaches of the palazzo.

Since we know from the historical note at the beginning that she will die, the suspense that powers the novel—jacked up every time we return to the threatening fortezza—comes from wondering why it must come to that and whether she is able to resist in any way. Even in the other sections, there are hints and warnings, such as her learning about the Trojan War and how Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia after pretending she is to marry Achilles.

O’Farrell’s luscious writing pulled me in. I felt the prick of hairpins in Lucrezia’s hair, the stiff material of her gown. The “sweet, cloying smell” of lilies in her chamber came to me as did the “waterfall of noise” that “crashes down on her” when “[t]he gates creak open” and the glare in her eyes as she steps out of the palazzo where a carriage waits to take her to her wedding.

After the wedding, she and her maid are carried off to a villa in rural Tuscany. “They travel along a wide road, on either side of which are rows and rows of fruit trees—Lucrezia could, for a while, make out branches heavy with the round curves of peaches and perhaps the tear shape of lemons. But now it is too dark to see anything at all.” Meanwhile, Alfonso has been called back to Ferrara to deal with an emergency: his mother and oldest sister refusing to give up the new, forbidden Protestantism.

Some people in my book club considered the portrayal of a noble woman such as Lucrezia objecting to a political marriage to be an anachronism. Marriage at that time was considered a transaction, especially for rulers. Women such as these were raised knowing that marriages would be arranged for them based on political and/or economic benefits. Instead, this story projects modern-day women’s expectations of personal agency and a loving marriage on both Lucrezia and Alfonso’s sister Elisabetta, who is dallying with one of the guards.

Since I’m also reading Phillipa Gregory’s magnificent nonfiction book Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History, I’ve learned that some women did rebel against being subjugated and treated as property, even during this period. Therefore, I didn’t find it hard to believe that, out of all the women in the book who made no complaint about their arranged marriages, there could be a child such as Lucrezia, raised in  isolation and temperamentally different from her siblings, who would find it a terrifying prospect. Nor that Elisabetta, with all the dissension and rebellion within her own family, might give in to the attractions of a handsome guardsman.

I do agree, though, that many—most?—historical novels feature women and sometimes men whose modern sensibilities are at odds with their time period. I assume this is a necessary adjustment to attract the attention of modern readers.

One drawback of being exclusively in Lucrezia’s point of view is that her interest in and understanding of the other characters is limited. Thus, we don’t get to know them very well. I did find Alfonso interesting, with his combination of ruthlessness—necessary for anyone trying to rule in such embattled times—and aesthetic awe of the castrati’s music, not to mention his rare whimsy. I would have liked to know more about Lucrezia’s maid Emilia, too.

The way O’Farrell orchestrates verb tenses captured my attention. Most chapters are in present tense, some, such as the one about the tiger, in past. And there’s even at least two sections in future tense. Usually, as is normal, the past tense is used for memories and flashbacks in present-tense sections, but now and then it is the past perfect. These are not errors, I believe, but a subtle way of capturing the multiple currents of time that swirl around us.

My book club discussed the ending at length. Some found it ambiguous and, indeed, came up with a few different interpretations. I won’t go into that, of course, but would love to hear what you thought of it, if you read the book.

Do you enjoy historical fiction based on the lives of real people? Why or why not?

Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

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The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer: objects of many sorts from the natural world whose strangeness and accidental proximity might inspire wonder and perhaps prompt a larger discussion.

Like the best sort of host, MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders and then lets us make of them what we will. There’s no lecturing. Although she is a presence in the book, it is not about her. Instead, her evocative prose bears witness to these marvels, inviting us to experience them ourselves.

The essays range around the world and into varied environments: from fields and forests to volcanos and the Empire State Building. As MacDonald tells us about wild boars, boxing hares, and several sorts of birds, she encourages us to see the natural world as something other than a reflection of ourselves.  “What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has.” We are introduced to animals and birds as sentient beings in their own right, with their own needs and wants.

Another theme that runs through these essays is the effect of the loss of habitat on these creatures: those we have lost, such as the wood warblers, and the adaptions some have made, such as the peregrine falcons nesting on the decommissioned power chimneys of the Poolbeg Power Station in Ireland.

For much of the 20th century, falcons were celebrated as romantic icons of threatened wilderness. The mountains and waterfall gorges where they chose to nest were sublime sites, where visitors could contemplate nature and meditate on the brevity of human existence. But there’s a romanticism to industrial sites too. The rusting chimneys and broken windows of the Poolbeg site have their own troubling beauty, that of things that have outlasted their use. Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality, mountains by virtue of their eternity, industrial ruins by virtue of their reminding us that this too will in time be gone and that we should protect what is here and now.

Although she deplores the idea that the natural world should be preserved because we humans find it useful in lifting our moods or teaching us about ourselves, insisting instead that it has its own right to exist independently of us, she is not averse to showing how we benefit. She says, “At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need be spoken. And if you were watching urban falcons, this is not a distant world but one alongside you, a place of transient and graceful refuge.”

Among my favorite parts is the titular essay, which is about chimney swifts and their still mysterious ascent. Twice a day, at dusk and dawn, they fly up out of human sight, where “flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly orienting themselves.” Another thing I learned is that “Unlike other birds, they never descend to the ground.” Now, when I walk in the evening and see the swifts whirling above, her words speak to me: “Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding.”

Another, related theme in these essays is loss: the lost paradises of youth, the chestnut and elm trees that once graced our streets, the extinction or near-extinction of many species. This spring I was thrilled to hear a cuckoo while walking in England, where their population has dramatically declined. She says:

Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.

And:

Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather, passed from existence into a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can’t say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was.

Yet there is hope here as well, and treasures to embrace. Even her “Eulogy” for her friend Stu is filled with peace and hope along with the sadness, its ending giving me goosebumps just remembering it.

I keep thinking I’ve finished this book, yet find myself coming back again and again to this essay or that one. I love the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world” and opens for me some of its wonders.

What essay or book have you read that reminded you of the wonders of the natural world?