![]() ![]() If this patch of the North Country sounds like a provincial cage, just think of it as a Canadian Yoknapatawpha County, and ignore the ways the plainspoken Munro is otherwise anti-Faulknerian. Occasionally they move to the vicinity of Vancouver, only to go back to Ontario again. ![]() Ordinary people turn out to live in a rural corner of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort. She writes about and redeems ordinary life, ordinary people – ‘people people people’, as Jonathan Franzen puts it. ![]() ![]() She has preternatural powers of sympathy and empathy, but she’s never sentimental. Over a career now in its sixth decade, she’s rehearsed the same themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation. So she writes only short stories, but the stories are richer than most novels. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings. There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. ![]()
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