Dark Side of Munro

Too Much Happiness,Munro’s tenth and latest collection,has a terse and jerky quality. She still works the same strings,but seems somehow impatient with her material. A story lingeringly recounted by a teenage girl ends with the sudden and harsh “I grew up. And old.” Another story “Face”,published in The New Yorker earlier,is about a physically scarred little boy whose mother protects him from full knowledge — until a childhood playmate innocently smears paint on her face in imitation. That incident blows the friendship apart,but it is later discovered that the girl had later mutilated her own face in expiation. Years later,he thinks: what if he ran into her,managed an embarrassing and meaningless conversation on the subway,swapped life details? “You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course,and for a while,and never.”

While time has always been stretchy and bendy in Munro’s stories (glancing across generations sometimes,other times zooming in on revelatory instance),many of the stories here present jagged slices of lives,and they don’t all cohere emotionally. They are about the pasts nested in the present,and people confronting their discarded selves. In “Free Radicals”,Nina,recently bereaved and dying of cancer,recalls her husband’s previous marriage,and how easily she “played the younger woman,the happy home wrecker,the lissome,laughing,tripping ingénue”,even as she mines her own life for a slick story,to escape a mugging. That flat,affectless telling works less well in stories like “Deep-Holes” and “Child’s Play”. There is also,surprisingly,plenty of action in this collection — murder,sexual violence,trauma and dysfunction — along with the spiky observation of social and sexual connection. In “‘Some Women”,a young girl watches an older,attractive masseuse flirting with an invalid and unwittingly revealing she had no idea who Alexander the Great was. The observing child abruptly realises “something shocking,saddening” — how Mr. Crozier “liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue,like a lick of toffee”.

Munro is at her best in the title story — spanning St. Petersburg,Paris and Stockholm,it is part truth and part artistic lies. Sophia Kovalevsky (whose name has been given to a crater on the moon) was a 19th century Russian mathematician and novelist,and a woman in love. Inconveniently enough,she wins the Bordin Prize,is feted and celebrated by the world for a “mind most unconventionally furnished,under her curls”,but rejected by her jealous,sulky lover. “Always remember that when a man goes out of a room,he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her,” advises her friend Marie Mendelson. Sophia’s life,miserable and charmed by turns,is a stage for the turbulent politics of her time. As she interleaves Sophia’s despair and her delirious happiness with scenes from her life,this is Munro’s storytelling at its best.