By David Crouse
I suppose it’s appropriate that I begin with a discussion of the work of Alice Munro, and specifically her new book Too Much Happiness (Knopf 2009), as I’ve diligently read each new Alice Munro collection since being spellbound—and a bit confused— by the intricacies of Friend of My Youth more than fifteen years ago.
What made that particular book so compelling was its opaqueness. The stories were murky, sometimes deliberately obtuse, and although the settings and characters were described vividly enough, it seemed as if I was viewing them through a dirty window or from the top of a deep tunnel. The narratives almost never moved in a straight line; in fact, they were just as likely to move backward as forward, to overlap and eat their own tails, or to wander off in a completely new direction—a tangent that would later become an essential part of the story. I would get to the end and immediately go back to the beginning and start over, and it would happen again—just as I thought I was truly understanding the story contradictory information would intrude and I’d be turning back the pages again. They made me feel a little stupid, to be honest.
Of course, feeling stupid is sometimes a necessary part of the learning process.
Sharing the book with other young writers, I wasn’t surprised that it made most of them more than a little angry. Young writers are often a pretty conservative bunch, and here was someone who seemed to be rejecting everything we had considered artful and correct about the writing of the short story. Which is to say that there was something very artful going on here—only the most pragmatic and close-minded of my writer friends wouldn’t admit to that—but a different kind of artfulness, something more appropriate to a novel, or a memoir, or the pure associative mess that results when an old friend sits talking to you later at night, trying remember a complicated event that happened a long, long time ago.
I admit that she made me a little annoyed as well, but I kept returning, reading backward to her earliest work, and awaiting each new book as they appeared as regularly as state elections: Open Secrets, The Love of a Good Woman, and so on, each one gaining her more popularity and critical accolades. If someone had walked into my room while I was reading Friend of My Youth that first time and told me that this was a writer who would one day find widespread public recognition and even fame I would have laughed in disbelief.
Since then I’ve discovered that it’s often the book that frustrates us that stays with us. And so Munro stayed with me, and became a solution to some philosophical and artistic problems of my own. If the early stories of Raymond Carver and Grace Paley showed me how little a story needed to be powerful—that, in fact, its smallness could be the essential part of its power—then Munro showed me how much you could put in, how many layers, changes of direction, perspectives, and time frames. This is, of course, also an act of distillation, but it’s as if she’s trying to squeeze an entire novel—an entire life—into twenty or thirty pages.
This brings me to Too Much Happiness, a book that contains not very much at all of what first puzzled and then astounded me about Alice Munro. The stories here are much more straightforward, the endings streamlined, the dramatic action clear and immediate. Lots of violence and sex and death, and much of it told in plain, direct language. It’s a book worth reading—all of Munro’s books are worth reading—but the simplicity of approach here is a little strange, because one thing Alice Munro has never been guilty of is being an easy read. Too Much Happiness is exactly that—an easy read—and because it’s an easy read even the best stories here lack the haunting quality of her more complex work.
Some of these stories have been around for a while. The story “Wood,” for instance, predates some of her more recently published work. So Too Much Happiness might be an exercise in desk drawer cleaning before publishing new work or releasing another Collected Stories. In the meantime I suggest that readers new to Munro’s work begin with Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage or The Love of a Good Woman. These are books that, while a little more accessible than the earlier work, still possess that mysterious puzzle-like quality of her best stories. Then work your way backward to the brilliant Friend of My Youth.
David Crouse is an author and teacher. His collection of short fiction, Copy Cats, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2005 and was nominated for the Pen-Faulkner the following year. A second collection, The Man Back There, was published in 2008 by Sarabande Books and was awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. For more information visit www.davidcrousehouse.com.
David is married to the poet Melina Draper. They live in Fairbanks, Alaska with their son Dylan and enormous dog Bug.