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Alice Munro's latest collection of stories, Too Much Happiness, features ten newly collected stories, almost all of which have been previously published in The New Yorker or Harper’s since 2005. The stories feature a motley mix of victims of others’ unhappiness in moments of reflection, revelations, and restarts.
What makes reading Munro such a pleasure is the ease at which her stories flow from relatively ordinary plots and gives them unexpected and satisfying depth with each twist and turn. In “Free Radicals,” a widow becomes the victim of a burglary and finds herself confessing her life story in an uncomfortably cathartic moment, attempting to discourage the burglar from taking any more than he already has. In the chilling “Child’s Play,” a woman apathetically recounts an unexpectedly cruel incident at summer camp involving an altercation with a girl she heavily disliked during her adolescence.
Still, it’s not so much the situations they’re in as much as the way the characters are portrayed and the way Munro captures the thoughts behind their choices, the hurt attached to their memories that gives the collection its backbone. That’s not to say Too Much Happiness is all about the feelings; it certainly carries its weight in sentimentality, but not at the loss of a truly interesting plot. If there’s anything Alice Munro has managed to do in over 40 years of writing, it’s putting the microscope right on the point of impact and letting it bleed.
In “Fiction” Joyce discovers she is the basis of a story written by author Christie O’Dell, a former student who may also be the daughter of the woman who broke up Christie’s first marriage. Though initially intriguing, the story weighs heavy on Joyce, who is reminded of her painful past in “a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.” As it delves into Joyce’s past and more recent insecurities, “Fiction” is perhaps one of the collection’s more savory inclusions. The more Munro’s characters walk thin lines of grief and vulnerability, the more realistic they become. “You would think she had nothing to do with it,” Munro writes of Joyce. “As if the story was just a skin she wiggled out of and left on the grass."
“Face” and “Deep-Holes” are more straightforward stories of rejection. In “Face,” a man born with a facial birthmark reflects on his life being both rejected and protected, individually, by his parents in one of Munro’s more provocative stories; discovering it’s not the birthmark but the stigma it’s expected to carry that ultimately shapes his life. In “Deep-Holes” a young man who feels rejected by his father in childhood, rebels against the conventional family unit and spends his adult life deliberately separated from them saying once to his Mother: “I’m not in your world, you’re not in mine.” On the surface, it may seem these stories are about one thing (a face, a hole) and then another (an acceptance, a truth) but the darkness that occupies the collection are stories that seem only to benefit from Munro’s subtle, sometimes tragic gestures. “Something happened here,” she writes in “Face.” “In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”
In “Fiction,” Munro writes, “It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.”
In that sense, Too Much Happiness is an ironic name for stories packed so tightly with pain; a hopelessly honest collection that will resonate for longer than it takes to consume.
(February, 2010)
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