Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage was published in 2001 when Alice Munro was 70 years old. Two of the stories have been adapted for film, the title story and "The Bear Comes Over the Mountain".

Allison:

This is Alice Munro’s tenth (tenth!) collection of short stories. She has published sixteen books of collected stories, never a novel. In 2013 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming one of only two Canadians to win the prize (Saul Bellow, an antithesis and the only other) and the first North American since Toni Morrison twenty years earlier. As far as I can tell, and what I remember from the time she won, Alice Munro is the only author to ever win the prize for a body of work comprising only short stories. I picked this book because I think Alice Munro best encompasses the phrase “contemporary classic.” I have also never read her, and doubted very much if Dad had.

            These stories are about loss. I was thinking how, although some of her main characters are in their twenties, I am glad I waited until my mid-thirties to read this. The loss of these characters is quiet, not romantic and weepy and wailing like loss is felt in youth. There is tremendous loneliness in these stories, in the frank manner the narrators (mostly first person, but some close and even omniscient third) reveal their fantastical escape from the narrowness of their bodily lives. I am thinking of Jinny (close third person) in “Floating Bridge” who at forty-two has gone through a submission to cancer: “And yet—the excitement. The unspeakable excitement you feel when a galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility for your own life. Then for shame you must compose yourself and stay very quiet.” These are words that sum all of what I got from Munro. Jinny isn’t dying. She’s been told the cancer is in remission. The news doesn’t feel like relief, because she is so very tired, and she’s done all the hard work of acceptance. Now she starts over, still her, still alive.  These are rough, rough feelings. Given a coveted second chance and lamenting the loss of the freedom of death. We the reader are getting unprecedented access to the inner contents of individuals, stuff they don’t speak aloud to even those closest to them, and it is melancholic, like we humans are. Or I am. But not pitiable. Rather, complicated, unsortable, as Jinny expresses, unutterable. What if she said this to her husband? How that would wound.

            Things like this, when offered aloud have impact on the one who receives because the one who hears is just as selfish and isolated as the one who speaks. But when mused alone, these big floppy ideas remain suspended, “floating” as it were. Lonely, but painless. This is what the book is about. The unutterables. It so happens, Munro’s stories come full circle, because she, in writing, is communing with our own unutterables, those that are so lonely yet extraordinarily identifiable in art. We can’t express it our own little universes because to do so means terrible impact and impact is not the desire, not the point.  Instead, we search it out in film, art, literature, any medium that can possibly make our interior existence less tiny and insular.

            Alone in our heads, we can imagine what we’d like, and we can interpret what we don’t. In “Family Furnishings” we readers get a clue that the narrator (first person this time) easily ignores. There’s a hint that the narrator’s second cousin, Alfrida, bore a child by the narrator’s father, a child she had to give up because of the incestuous and scandalous nature of conception. A secret easily sussed, but of course we can only speculate because we are locked into the mind of the narrator and for her, this thought simply must not be thought. Maybe we readers find this the most interesting part of the story, but it’s not what the narrator wants to tell us. This is a story about her after all, not Alfrida’s demons. So instead, “Family Furnishings” ends with the narrator, who is a burgeoning writer, justifying her creation of a short story stolen from Alfrida’s deepest pain. The narrator lies to herself deliberately, and arguably less convincingly, but informs the reader that it doesn’t matter if she’s manipulating truth when she says: “I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories… This is what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.” Alfrida had given the narrator something precious. She had said aloud words that had belonged only to her, something so arresting and gorgeous, I underlined it three times on the page and wrote “whoa!” in the margins before I even knew the future significance. The narrator steals this spoken marvel and puts it into writing and is possibly never forgiven. This goes back to the unutterable, the melancholic interior. When these things are offered as spoken words they lose their lonely subservience to the thinker. They become free rein for anyone to snatch and exploit. That’s what writers do after all, and Alice Munro is conducting a master class in this story.

            I could talk long and thoroughly about all these stories. Things I would love to talk about:

-Canada. Its pioneer presence in the stories. Women and men marry young and hard, and then all the “love that was not usable” (from “Nettles”). Is this a generational concept, Munro is 85 years old after all, or is there something transferable from these vaguely rural lifestyles to my own Metropolis living? How can we compare the interior solitude these characters to the vapid loneliness of Fitzgerald’s wealthy in The Beautiful and Damned? Does one feel more authentic than the other?

-Point of view. She writes predominately from the feminine and men’s unutterables are for the most part tightly explained by women: “Men were not like this, in my experience. Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn’t want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.” (“Family Furnishings”) But then in “Nettles” the man does confess, he offers the ugliest thing he can as release, while in the same story the narrator passes over her own loss of connection to her children through divorce, as ugly and arguably as painful to acknowledge. And in the final story, “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain” we have a male narrator (close third person) who confesses infidelities and offers new love to his Alzheimer’s inflicted wife in the form of another man, without hesitation. What a beautiful and complicated story. But I am a woman. I am hyper critical of men writing women (the favorite and best exception is Peter Carey’s astonishing book My Life as a Fake—potentially my favorite book of all time). Is it convincing from the male point of view?

            There’s much to examine in Munro’s craft. The plot is spare, the echoes of the body tied close to the interior of the mind is fascinating and elicit and normal and plain and startling all the same. These are long stories compared to contemporary style. Nowadays we want to read on our cell phones, on our 15 minute coffee breaks, even still I was surprised that they filled 315 pages. 315 pages is a substantial novel, but Alice Munro has given nine micronovels in the same space. I felt the investment I feel reading novels in each of the stories. Novel vs short story is kind of like debating memoir vs autobiography. Memoir is thought to be a highlight—a moment of a life, while autobiography encompasses all. Memoir: a pork chop, autobiography (and biography): outdoor pig roast. These stories defy convention. These stories are whole hog.   

            I give this book a 1 on a scale of 1-10. Yep. My fist solid 1.

Wes:

This month’s reading is a collection of short stories by the Canadian author, Alice Munro. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 with this work. Commentaries on the cover rank her with Chekhov and predict she will be the “living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years.” Whether this is true or not is to be seen. My thoughts about each story are provided below under each title.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The title of the whole collection comes from the first story. It is a story about a plain, but sturdy, housekeeper, Johanna Parry, who is tricked by her employer’s teenage granddaughter into forsaking her life in Ontario for the romantic hope that the grandfather’s widowed son-in-law, Ken Boudreau, recently a winner of a hotel in the Saskatchewan prairie, might marry her and they would then live happily ever after. The daughter and her friend intercepted a letter Johanna had secretly inserted into the outgoing letter and they forged a correspondence from Boudreau to Johanna that led Johanna to quit her job and flee to Saskatchewan to meet who she thought was her lover. Finding Boudreau delirious, she nurses him to health and they, in fact, do marry and have a child to the mystification of the teenagers

The title evidently cycles through this chain of events, turning from the hatred of the daughter for her father (hateship) through the aberrant friendship of the two young girls to the mysterious courtship and marriage of Boudreau and Johanna. I liked the story but found much fluff in the tale with some weird descriptions that had little to do with the tale such as the long description in the dress shop and the train station when Johanna planned her wedding and shipping Boudreau’s furniture. Why Johanna walked miles to a town when Boudreau’s hotel was within sight of the prairie station was weird. Overall, it was a good story but was rather contrived to make the unlikely plot work.

Floating Bridge

Jinny, a recovering cancer patient is being taken home by Neal Lockyer, her aging hipster husband. He plans to hire a young woman, Helen, to nurse his wife and picks her up on the way home but, instead of taking Jinny home, they drive several miles to Helen’s parent’s house where Neal and Helen disappear while Jinny sits in the hot car for an extended period, spending time wandering in a cornfield. Helen’s brother, Rickie, suddenly appears on his bike and insists on driving Jinny home. When she agrees, he takes her out into the darkening night to a tannin bog, common in Canada, where they stop on a floating bridge and stare at the stars for a while. Suddenly the youngster passionately kisses Jinny, twice his age, and the story ends. This story made such little sense that I think it was really a dream. She is probably still in the hospital and is having her final dream sequence. I think this is clear when, off the wall, we find Jinny has no panties on and suddenly urinates dark brown urine in the middle of the road. Brown urine is a sure sign of approaching death and the dream-like quality of the story seemed to be her final thoughts proceeding over the River Styx. 

Family Furnishings                   

An unnamed female narrator presents anecdotes of her parents as they entertain relatives over the years. One memorable visitor to the farm is Alfrida, the first cousin of the narrator’s father, both of whom were in high school at or around the end of World War I. This woman seems a more extraordinary event than usual – she seems some kind of a special person. We learn more and more about this second cousin as the story proceeds. The narrator grows up and goes off to college and later meets Alfrida and her boyfriend in her apartment. Moving forward many years later, the narrator attends her father’s funeral where she meets Alfrida’s daughter who says she was abandoned when a baby. The circumstances of the discussion at the end led me to believe that the narrator and this daughter probably were twin sisters from an illicit love affair of Alfrida and her father long ago. The two girls were probably split up, one to adoption with the narrator to the biological father. That is my story on the meaning of this convoluted tale and I’m sticking to it.   

Comfort

Nina Spiers comes home and discovers that her husband has committed suicide with his medicine. He has been afflicted with a rapid degenerative disease and was troubled by his separation from his job as a high school biology teacher. We find that his problems stemmed from his insistence that he could never teach the creation theory despite opposition from the locals. Nina has long supported him but has doubts about his intense stubbornness over the issue. The story weaves in her distress over having him immediately cremated as he desired. The funeral director has, against her will, embalmed the body for those who wanted to memorialize him. We find that the director, Ed Shore, has had a crush on Nina for a while. I think the author had an interesting dialogue with someone about how bodies are prepared for burial and she wrote this whole story in order to feature a description of that process.

Nettles

This is sort of a whimsical tale of a woman going to visit a friend’s summer home and unexpectedly meeting a childhood friend she has not seen in many years. Her somewhat troubled life and marriage is outlined as she retreats across the country from her original home. Meeting Mike, the long-lost friend, brings a flood of memories of when Mike’s father came to dig a well on her father’s farm and they whiled away the summer in innocent child play. Now as adults with marriage problems, both exhibit different urges. The narrator has strong desires toward Mike until she finds out he is grieving over his child he has tragically run over and killed. This presents a wall she cannot cross. They go alone together to golf but a sudden storm and the revelation of his sad story interrupt any chance at intimacy. Instead they get a rash from nettles from weeds they took cover in from in the storm. The narrator still yearns for her lost love as the years pass. We know this by her searching for the summer home and the golf course trying to revive those long-lost feelings.

Post and Beam

Lorna and Brendan have married and for some years lived in North Vancouver, across the country from where Lorna grew up. They have befriended a brilliant mathematics student, Lionel, who dropped out of college, lost his mother to suicide and has some mental problems. Brendan is a college professor whose routine in their classic “Post and Beam” style house is disrupted when Polly, Lorna’s cousin, comes to visit for a couple of weeks. Lorna fears for her well-being when they suddenly leave for an out-of-town wedding and leaves Polly alone in the house. Instead of Polly’s suicide, which Lorna envisions happening on the return drive, Lionel meets Polly and both he and she seem radically changed for the better by their relationship. Lorna, an unbeliever, had prayed promising to change her ways if Polly is OK when they return. Now she has to reciprocate but the only change she decides to do is to go on living her life.

What is Remembered

Meriel and her husband, Pierre, attend the funeral of one of his friends who was killed in a motorcycle accident. The doctor who treated the decedent becomes acquainted with them at the wake and offers to take Meriel to visit her Aunt Muriel in a local rest home while her husband hurries to relieve the baby sitter of their two children. Meriel and the doctor end up having a brief affair that afternoon before he takes her to the ferry home. For the next 30 years, she mentally relives every detail of that afternoon until Pierre passes away when she suddenly remembers the way Doctor Asher brushed off a final kiss at their parting, a mannerism that probably saved her marriage and prevented a life of wantonness and promiscuity.

Queenie

Chrissy heads to Toronto looking for a summer job until college opens in the fall. She stays with her half-sister, Lena, otherwise known as Queenie, and her husband. Queenie ran away from home and married their next door neighbor, Stan Vorguilla, whose previous wife had died. The story bounces from childhood past to tidbits of Queenie’s life with Mr. Vorguilla. Queenie’s mother/Chrissy’s step-mother suspected her neighbor of something evil and was distressed when Lena ran away. What her suspicions were are not made clear but hints emerge. As Chrissy begins college, she learns that Queenie again ran away allegedly with one of Stan’s music students. It is never known for sure and for many years, Chrissy thinks of her half-sister and believes she sees her here and there but never is there closure. The reader has several options on what might have happened. I think Stan was exceedingly domineering sexually and emotionally and drove his first wife to death and Queenie away. The incident with the book on odalisque behavior in harems was the biggest clue.

The Bear Came over the Mountain

Fiona and Grant have been married for almost 50 years and are living in Fiona’s parent’s house. Their retirement is interrupted by the onset of Fiona’s dementia. Whether it’s Alzheimer’s is not known but she is sent to a rest home for those with those problems. Grant visits after a month’s hiatus and discovers Fiona has affections for Aubrey, a male patient who is confined to a wheelchair. Although Fiona lives on the 1^st floor where those with some cognizance stay (the second floor is the lockup for those “out of it”), she seems not to recognize Grant when he visits and clings to Aubrey. After Aubrey’s wife removes him, Fiona begins to decline. The desperate Grant visits Marian, the wife, seeking to have her bring Aubrey back for visits. She denies his request initially but their mutual loneliness brings them together and Marian takes Aubrey for visits with Fiona again. Although the story is straightforward, we find Grant was quite a philanderer as a college professor and his guilt over sending Fiona away early is palpable but not enough to stop his philandering ways.

Overall, this book was interesting in the scope and breadth of the stories. They had a kind of wistful quality about them. They each seemed to all provide one person’s perception of their surroundings and what others are doing. One seldom knows the whole story about others. You only get brief glimpses of what really is going on – sort of like a kaleidoscope of life around you. You make of it what you like but you may be right or you might be wrong in analyzing those glimpses. Seldom does what you think have much effect on the outcomes in other’s lives. I rate this collection of stories as a 3 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).