Canadians and Hoosiers

I know a person in Ontario who will boil up at this post for I will again argue there is a similarity between Ontario and Indiana. I think Susan Sheridan's Radiant, everlasting: Dear Life by Alice Munro hit the point for me: it is in both areas rely so much on small towns. Indiana's identify is almost certainly not based on Indianapolis (notwithstanding its economic or political clout, or the works of Booth Tarkington or Dan Wakefield). Is not our favorite Hoosier myth the Milan Miracle?

It was not only small town life that Munro redeemed for literature, it was also ‘the lives of girls and women’ – that is, material which was regularly shunned and despised, ‘the lives of women at their most muddled … who can’t quite believe in the world of careers … or just managing to keep afloat in the woozy world of maternity, with its shocks and confusions and fearful love and secret brutality.’ Munro wrote these words in appreciation for what she had learned from her contemporary, Marian Engel. They belonged to an extraordinary group of women writers who emerged in the 1960s, including Margaret Laurence and Audrey Thomas, as well as Atwood, who changed the map of Canadian literature, opening up new possibilities for fiction, eventually forcing an expansion of ideas about the universality of human experience to include the feminine, the suburban and the provincial.

Reviews of Munro’s latest book of stories, Dear Life, invariably remark on the way she uses ordinary characters and events to explore the human condition. Yet it was not so long ago that these very characters would have been seen as unsuitable material for serious fiction, as too limited to accommodate the universal. The situations they enter into are banal – marriage and adultery, conflicts between parents and children, ageing and its discontents, loneliness in many forms. What makes the stories ‘radiant, everlasting’ is Munro’s art, in particular her use of point of view, and her manipulation of narrative time.

 Kurt Vonnegut set only God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in Indiana and then it was in his fictional Rosewater County. 

The writer I believe has best captured Indiana is also a short story writer writing about our small towns, Michael Martone. If you have not read him, chase down his books now.

And how Ms. Sheridan describes Munro's characters they make me think also of Indiana, particularly the Indiana of my grandparents' time, even a bit of parents' times.

The stories in Dear Life have long timelines that run from the immediate post-war years to the present. Several begin with a ‘once upon a time’ kind of phrase, such as ‘In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town’, or ‘All this happened in the seventies, though in that town and in other small towns like it, the seventies were not as we picture them now.’ Attention is often drawn to the social changes time has brought, especially in women’s lives. In the opening story ‘To Reach Japan’, Greta, the young narrator, digresses: ‘It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not’ for a woman, when ‘having any serious idea or maybe even reading a real book, could be seen as suspect, having something to do with your child’s getting pneumonia.’ But Greta is not uncritical of the changes that the 1960s would bring, when ‘barriers between the inside and the outside of your head were to be trampled down. Authenticity required it. Things like Greta’s poems, things that did not flow right out, were suspect, even scorned.’ In the middle of ‘Leaving Maverley’, the narrator refers in passing to people being ‘swept up in this bright new era, their former viewpoints dismissed and their language altered, straining to be crisp and crude.’

And what did I find when I located Ms. Munro's Nobel Lecture? 

What can be so interesting in describing small town Canadian life?

You just have to be there. I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting, I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level. I didn’t have to cope with that. I was the only person I knew who wrote stories, though I didn’t tell them to anybody, and as far as I knew, at least for a while, I was the only person who could do this in the world.

And this:

 Who do you think you are? What has that expression meant to you?

Well, I grew up in the countryside, I grew up with people who were generally Scotch-Irish, and it was a very common idea not to try too much, never to think you were smart. That was another image that was popular, “Ah, you think you are smart.” And to do anything like writing you’d have to think you were smart, for quite a while, but I was just a peculiar person.