Village Squire, 1978-12, Page 46Ontario. She has a writing style that puts
life under a microscope and the results are
not always pleasant.
Her central character Rose grows up
with her father and stepmother in a gritty
grimy slum area of a small town where the
Munro style of realism brings out all the
unpleasantness of life. It's a side of small
town life most of us have never really seen.
even if it was there for us to see.
Rose grows up from this impoverished
beginning to be a scholar and develops a
surprisingly middle class consciousness.
She goes to the University of Western
Ontario in London where she attracts the
attentions of a scholarly heir to a British
Columbia department store empire who
she ends up reluctantly marrying. It is the
beginning of a lifetime of unsuccessful
dealings with love and men. It's refreshing
to know that the microscope of Munro
prose is just as devastating on the lives of
the urban rich as it is on the small-town
poor. The material things may be far more
splendid with her rich in-laws, but the
human element is every bit as bleak as with
Rose's own family.
One of the interesting developments of
the book is the growing understanding of
her step -mother that emerges in Rose as
she goes through adult life. In the long run
no is a crotchety old hag of a woman but
there is genuine affection for her where
once there was only resentment.
Alice Munro is one of the best
arguments there is for the fallacy of those
who say that Canadians can not have
success if they cling to cultural
nationalism. Not only is Ms. Munro's work
completely Canadian, it is very much based
in rural Western Ontario. Yet not only has
she found success all across Canada but
many of the stories in this collection have
been previously published in such fashion-
able American publications as The New
Yorker, the bible of elite urban
sophistication. The secret of her interna-
tional success is that no matter where her
people come from, the emphasis is on
relationships between people. The rela-
tionships are treated honestly too. When
Rose's marriage finally breaks down
completely after deteriorating into a violent
war one might expect given the current
feminist fashion of making the woman the
victim of the piece that the husband would
be blamed. Ms. Munro, through Rose,
seems to accept the fact that both parties
are to blame with perhaps Rose being even
more so for being foolish to get into a
marriage she didn't even want.
It's this honesty that makes Ms. Munro
so unique among today's authors. There's
nothing here of the following of the literary
fashion of the moment. She is true to her
own background and to the subjects she
knows the best. And we in Western
Ontario are fortunate to have a writer of
her calibre among us.
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? by
Alice Munro, Macmillan of Canada, 206
pages, 510.95.
44 Village Squire, December 1978
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