January 2006: Runaway (Munro)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 8:33:25 PM

What do 19 Smithies (from class of 1946 to 2005) think of Alice Munro's short stories in the collection called Runaway (the title of the first story, originally published in The New Yorker)? Quite a mixture of opinions! In the course of almost two hours on January 19, 2006, everyone spoke and discussion was good because some people didn't like it, some liked the writing -- particularly her sharp descriptions of mundane details -- and others said they had to re-read whole paragraphs to grasp them.

We struggled with the format of short stories not being long or robust enough to fill out the characters to the point that we could really know them (though they stay with us), that the book left gaping holes in the stories of these women's lives and we're left wondering what happened in between. One suggestion about the variation in response to those gaps was that with age and/or life experience the reader may more easily fill in spaces in the story, may more easily accept things going unexplained. Munro describes life events from the perspective of women's experience -- which conditions are often difficult and trying -- with almost-psychological insight. These stories are rare in that they capture human life events, the kind of things people are often hesitant to discuss. They "air dirty laundry," exploring the parts of women's lives that they might not be proud of, the struggles and peculiarities of personality they encountered in their lives in small-town Canada, the shadows of their experience, in several cases over a wide span of years in their lives. As readers we know we're not getting the full picture, but we are offered the private side of the characters, which is not necessarily welcome or comfortable. (Somehow we did not get to "Trespasses", the story about the adopted daughter, which deals with some difficult issues and could be an excellent discussion.)

Meghan asked whether short stories, of necessity like poetry in how concise and deliberate each phrase must be, are better when we listen to them rather than read them, and we mused about listening to a Checkov story together (if anyone has a good short story on CD, we can try to fit in listening to it at an upcoming book club gathering). For those who don't like short stories in general, it was torture that several other collections of short stories were suggested for our next meeting, and after several suggestions including Housekeeping, a novel by Marilynne Robinson (decided it was too similar in tone to Runaway) and What's the Matter with Kansas? (now out in paperback), we settled on Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (arguably part of the contemporary "book club canon").

Afterwards, about 8 people stayed on to watch Jennie's housemate Juliet's showing of "A Good Uplift," a 13-minute documentary by Juliet's friend Faye, about a bra shop on the lower-east side of Manhattan. Donna commented, "the book discussion and the video content went amusingly well together."

Short stories/collections mentioned

• • Brokeback Mountain (New Yorker 1997) is in Close Range : Wyoming Stories (paperback came out in 2000) by Annie Proulx. There is a book called Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (paperback) that contains Annie Proulx's original short story version of Brokeback Mountain as it appeared in The New Yorker along with the screenplay to Ang Lee's film by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. The movie is in theatres now.

  • Interpreter of Maladies stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

  • Anton Checkov, short story master (he published over 40) and reference point (The Boston Globe review of Runaway says Alice Munro "outjoices Joyce and checkmates Chekhov")

  • Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner

• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty