Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014 By Alice Munro, $30.
When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, she was 82 years old and had already officially announced that she was retiring from writing. The Canadian author had collected every conceivable literary prize by that point anyway, and at long last her sales matched her acclaim. Why not leave on top? What the selections in Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014 reveal is she’s been at the top for a very long time.
There is simply not a better writer of short fiction alive.
In “Passion,” for instance, first published in her 2004 collection Runaway, that common trope of the lost youthful summer at the lake takes on a shocking gloss when Grace, the narrator, runs off with her fiancé Maury’s drunk brother Neil, only for Neil to die that night in a car accident. “She did not have to deal with Maury face-to-face. He wrote her a letter. Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go. She wrote back five words. I did want to go. She was going to add I’m sorry, but stopped herself.” In just those brief sentences, Munro does what few writers can: convey that intractable truth of a moment. Grace made a decision that set her up for a good life, it seems, if one coupled with the same regrets we all have. But what Grace is not, what Munro’s characters rarely are, is passive. They make choices. Often, the worse ones.
Like Jackson, the main character of “Train,” from Munro’s last full collection, 2012’s Dear Life. Jackson steps off a train in rural Canada, running away from a difficult past, and settles at a farm with a woman named Belle, whom he lives with for the next two decades, seemingly without any emotion at all … until he simply walks out of her life, too, at a hospital in Toronto. “Things could be locked up, it only took some determination,” Jackson thinks, and it ends up being a mantra for his existence. Avoidance always one train stop away, even if it takes Jackson 20 years to step off.
The machinery of love is a common return for Munro. Her classic “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” which centers on a terrible hoax involving love letters forged by bored kids that actually ends up bringing together a lasting marriage between two desperately lonely people, is a master class on Munro. A horrible decision leads to a surprising end, but in the middle the benign cruelty of humanity comes into contact with our great capacity to love, to change, to become truer versions of ourselves.
If the stories in Family Furnishings are indeed from the last act of Munro’s writing life, it’s a perfect coda to the master’s work: uncomfortable, enlightening, troubled, but wonderfully human. Alice Munro may have only written short stories, but in each is the mystery of life, the questions of existence, where the answers are rarely answered cleanly.
