Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women

I'm stanning for Munro now. This is Common Measure's first criticism-first post.

So these are just my opinions of the book. I’m not an accredited critic. I just like reading books and comparing them to other books I’ve read. I’ve tried to make this an engaging read. This is my first piece of criticism in the newsletter so please let me know your reaction in the comments.

But hey, it’s an easy book to start with, because it’s phenomenal. Nobel laureate Alice Munro deserves her position in world literature. Indeed, I’ve just come off the back of reading an imposing, significant American novel, ready to say that Munro is just as good. Her prose is rich with an uncanny understanding of psychological specificity and weirdness. Her treatment of characters is dispassionate. She is an excellent prose stylist, willing to take risks in order to produce beautiful writing.

As people will point out the book is a “cycle of short stories” but it honestly reads, except for infrequently, as a novel. There are hints that her short stories could stand on their own, but you get fairly lost between the chapters. Compare this to some frustrating chapter transitions in H.P. Lovecraft whose serialized prose reads like cop show reruns, in which they reexplain the whole story after every commercial break. Munro’s transitions are unobtrusive.

The novel opens on backwoods Flats Road outside of Jubilee, Ontario. Del Jordan’s father breeds silver foxes for their pelts during the Second World War. Del’s mother hates the rural isolation and eventually takes Del to live in downtown Jubilee.

One sign of a bad writer is when they give their characters boring names—of a great writer, dope names. Munro’s hero is named Del Jordan, which I love. Compare that to Hemingway’s protagonist Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls. The latter sounds like a stock heroic actionfigure name, and contributed strongly to my desire to stop reading said book. (Dgmr, I’m not a Hemingway hater.) Del Jordan, however, as anyone with a sensitive ear will note, is an interesting and authentically heroic name. It is so much easier to cheer for properly heroic characters, like Ulysses or Del Jordan. It makes me think of the birthplace of humanity — “of the Jordan.”

Del and her mother are atheists. Later in the novel, however, Del desultorily takes up religion, at least the outward motions of it—takes up congregating at the United Church—with a boyfriend. It is an act of pure inertia, and when he eventually tries to reify her commitment to the faith (in the context of a conversation about having children, in a baptism that turns out to border on attempted drowning) Del realizes how little she cares about religion, and throws it back in his face, overcoming the lazy slide toward a conversion narrative. 

A surprising amount of the book has to do with sex which, don’t worry, I won’t be cringey by reciting in detail here. Suffice it to say that Munro is bolder than Joyce — who half a century earlier would be censored for his bawdy — in her descriptions of sex, handles the subject with a deftness anyone would appreciate, given the difficulty thereof. I couldn’t help being reminded of some of the boldest literature when I was reading this book. There are several contemporary “edgy” French writers who aren’t pushing the boundaries far beyond where Munro set them in 1971—and with tact. 

Aside: I love this line from a ‘33 NYT article about Ulysses:

James Joyce's Ulysses, a novel which has been banned from the United States by customs censors on the ground that it might cause American readers to harbor “impure and lustful thoughts.”

“Impure and lustful thoughts” lmao. Here is a pure and sexless photo of my pug with the Indigo 25th Anniversary Edition of Lives of Girls and Women:

There are some parallels between Lives and my favourite stories from Dear Life (also by Munro)—the latter I read long ago, but one story in particular still literally haunts me, about a woman in a small town ignominiously jilted by her “honourable” lover. There were those vibes throughout the novel.

The final chapter is witty and metafictional: the protagonist of the novel begins to write a novel about a family whose story she had heard in town, with whom she sympathizes, and whose story she modifies to be more literary and universally significant. It makes one wonder what Munro’s relationship is to the story. (There is no such place that I can find on GMaps as Jubilee, although there is a church called Jubilee in Stratford, which is close to where Munro grew up. This Toronto Star article suggests Wingham is the town Jubilee represents.) How many steps removed from Munro’s own existence is this story removed, what is the line between fact and fiction, what elements did she choose to fictionalize, etc.? So, it’s Munro’s character in Munro’s fictionalized town—both of which are based on real life—creating her own fictionalized town and characters—both of which are ostensibly “based on real life,” i.e. relatively to Del Jordan. I love that shit.

Witty and metafictional, while yet dignified and beautiful:

“For this novel I had changed Jubilee, too, or picked out some features of it and ignored others. It became an older, darker, more decaying town, full of unpainted board fences covered with tattered posters advertising circuses, fall fairs, elections, that had long since come and gone,”—Del Jordan.

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P.S. Hilariously, when I googled Del Jordan, I got this image of sneakers back. They’re called Air Jordan Del Sols: