What do You think about The Love Of A Good Woman (2000)?
In this collection of eight short stories, Alice Munro writes about the ordinary lives of small town folk – mostly women – generally set in Canada around the 1950s. I’m not a fan of short story collections to begin with, and this collection hit all the reasons why I don’t care for them. With very similar settings and topics, all the stories blend together in my mind. Nothing and no one becomes memorable. And, I certainly can’t become attached to any character or emotionally invest in a story if I can’t even remember them.Beyond my initial bias against short stories, Munro’s writing does nothing for me. Why? BecauseNothing happens. Ever. In any of the stories.Munro has the most passive, roundabout, opaque way of storytelling that I’ve ever read. She purposely doesn’t spell out what is going on or exactly how characters are related. For instance, she begins “Save the Reaper” with two names – Eve and Sophie. And for the longest time, I thought they were friends, best friends perhaps, but certainly peers. Some pages later, I discover that I’d be wrong all along. In reviewing the text again, I notice that Munro leaves miniscule hints about their relationship, such as writing “when Sophie was a little girl” and neglecting to mention Eve’s age. Seriously? This is just frustrating.Munro has sometimes been described as a feminist writer, but I found that to be a bit of a misleading descriptor. She writes about female issues, for sure. She writes about the oppression experienced by women of bygone times. Pregnancies hidden. The lack of opportunity. Female sexuality. Motherhood. But, generally the label “feminist” fiction connotes a strong female lead to break through the oppression, to defy the rules, or at least to recognize the oppression and seethe at the injustice. There is usually something or someone for the reader to root. Nothing of the sort appears in any of these stories. Instead, we feel the oppression and read about the injustices with absolutely no recourse. The characters are too ordinary, too weak, and too unlikable for readers to relate to or root for.
—Viola
Now that I’m coming late to the books of Alice Munro, I’ve finally arrived at this: Nothing flashy, no showoff tactics and no clever calling attention to the author’s mastery. The whole-life characters who open their souls in Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman are drawn from a section of the planet where people are clouded in drizzle and where every step is hazarded on a piece of ground that sooner or later reverts to a path of slippery, sucking mud. In contrast to the murky, sliding settings, a continuous, no-nonsense brilliance illuminates every paragraph of these eight stories, and a never-shaken foundation of narrative clarity grounds each sentence. Munro surfaces life’s profundities in lyrical, colloquial prose that extends a sure grasp of the tangled complexities inherent to human relationships, all presented as a simple reading pleasure. The Love of a Good Woman, along with all its faceted depths, is fun. I admit: I have just this hour shut the book and am reeling from an initial contact high. It may be too early in my Munro studies to judge. Nonetheless, I suggest that the most valuable byproduct of Alice Munro’s genius is trust, a faith in the author based upon her thousand laser-points of insight and unwavering commitment to courage and truth. I need the reassurance of believing that somebody knows what’s going on here.
—Allan MacDonell
It's interesting that goodreads asks the question, "What did you think?" When reading Munro there are other questions that deserve asking: how did you feel; what shook your roots; what changed your beliefs? The stories in this collection all raised those issues, in varying degrees of course. Yesterday I went into the readers' comments for this book and was surprised that some people thought there was little going on and thus gave the book 2 stars. Looking at only one story, "Save the Reaper" for example, had so much happening on so many levels that my head hurt, my heart pounded, and I looked up in awe and wondered how Munro could pull it all off in such a low-key but brutal way. Several stories in this collection dealt with the consequences when things are kept mum between the generations or relations. That one simple element in her work(s) could be the basis for a dissertation.And, here is the problem with reading on my iPad. Sure, I have finished the book but, really, I will never be finished with it. So, do I store it in a file to return to months or years later? How different from having an array of actual books here in the house where I can easily return to them for more thought. Yet, so much easier to take a Munro collection on my travels for reading that a suitcase 3/4 filled with books and not enough clothes!
—Frances Sawaya
