Category: American Literature

Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

So much of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence is perfectly done that to write about it in a blog post becomes very difficult – it truly provides an embarrassment of novelistic riches. Such books are a blessing to a reader but a beast for the blogger. There is too much for me to say, even after a single (re)reading. Each word is a thread that can be followed, rather than merely plucked. Everything from flowers, to place (New York City), time (1870s), society, location, and language, works meaningfully to make this a supremely rewarding work for the analytical reader. And Wharton does all this with a prose that is clear and a story whose mysteries linger long after we finish it.

If I try to summarise it overmuch, the story might collapse into a mixture of predictability and familiarity. It is a question of the obligations owed to love in a restrictive society. Newland Archer, a marriageable young man of elevated social standing, gets engaged to May Welland, a pretty young lady from a good family who is ready for her husband to tell her what to do and who to be. Before the wedding, however, Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin and an old friend of Newland, returns to New York from the Old World without her husband. Older, wiser, ignorant of the finer rules of New York society, Newland finds himself falling quickly in love with Olenska. But New York is a powerful force within the novel, and Newland is “at heart a dilettante”. We wonder whether he has the strength to choose, or whether that choice will be made entirely for him.

With so many themes and ideas to select from, the one that strikes me as the best way into the novel is that of perspective. “Age” is in the title of The Age of Innocence, and while this might refer to either Newland or May at their stage of life, it also refers to their time as a whole. Furthermore, it can only refer to their time when we have the wisdom to look back from a time when that innocence is no longer present. It implies a multiple perspective. This multiplicity concerns the whole novel, which we can read differently, depending on how closely we wish to stick to Newland’s perspective. If we decide to step back, as I think the novel would like us to, then it moves beyond being a simple work of frustrated love and weak men and allows for a far more nuanced view.

Viewing

The narrator follows Newland throughout The Age of Innocence, with only occasional moments when they step back to give a kind of “society view” through reference to things like “the daily press” on the novel’s first page, or to the welter of names we as readers have to get used to. Indeed, one reason The Age of Innocence feels like a society novel is because there are so many people milling about that I began to suspect that Wharton’s intention was that I struggled to keep track of them all. Indeed, I soon began treating them abstractly in my head as “important” or “unimportant”, just as those same characters would judge those around them. Newland, our hero, is just another member of this mass when the book begins, and it is only as it progresses that he begins to find himself being able to view it from his own perspective.

This sense of massed perspective is established in the first scene, where we are present at an opera performance. To one on the stage there is only a mass of eyes staring down, undifferentiated, and Newland is up there among them. The opera is not so important, because it is Newland’s gaze we are interested in, emphasised by the repeated looking words like “contemplated,” “scanned”, and so on. Indeed, because he spends much time staring at May across the hall, we might notice and smile at the thought that her presence in her box is every bit a work of performance as is that of the person on the stage, something that becomes clearer and clearer as we learn about the New York of the 1870s over the course of the book. Newland does not actually do anything here, really, except look. This preference for observation over action proves one of the most distinctive elements of his character.

This early scene also introduces us to one side of the dynamic between May and Ellen, a comparison that exists in Newland’s perspective and develops as he observes both women. There’s a striking paragraph here which sets out his view on May and explains quite clearly why Ellen may prove alluring:

“He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the “younger set,” in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.”

This is funny, albeit in a terrible way. Look at the verbs – “wish”, “meant”, “develop”, “enabling” – each and every one of them looks to the future and presumes May has nothing to value now except her beautiful emptiness, her state as a blank canvas. Indeed, “Mrs Newland Archer” annihilates the name of his wife and thereby makes it clear how substitutable Newland must view this person as being. This is Newland’s view of May, and really, it does not change much as the novel progresses. He comes to contrast it mentally with Ellen, who has a history through her failed marriage. Unlike with May, whom Newland believes he must form, (hence requiring effort, something mildly distasteful to the dilettante, however pleasurable the reward), the temptation of Countess Olenska comes from the opportunity to discover a fully-formed personality. Since she thinks for herself, she is unknowable in the way that Newland believes May never could be.

Flowers

The constant presence of flowers within the novel both expands this comparison while also deepening it. Newland sends May lilies-of-the-valley every day, an action whose regularity (though it is not done by standing order) seems to predict the very predictability and conventionality of their married life. After reconnecting with Ellen, Newland finds himself in a flower shop, where his eyes land upon some yellow roses. “Too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty” – rather than send them to his betrothed, Newland sends them to Ellen. Ellen receives flowers from many admirers, and her display of them – scattered here and there in her house, rather than kept orderly – is taken by society as yet another mark against her personality, a reminder of the disorderliness of the woman who has failed her husband by separating from him. The orderliness of May’s flowers contrasts with the personality of Ellen’s to evidence the seeming accuracy of Newland’s judgements of the two women.

Yet the flowers are not just a prop of this sort. Nor even does their importance cease at the obvious symbolic readings we can find in them – wastefulness, fragile youth, and so on. It is with flowers that we see, perhaps most obviously, some of the limitations of Newland’s perspective. Newland purchases the yellow roses he sends to Ellen “almost without knowing what he did.” Indeed, that Newland continues sending flowers to her at further points of the story is only brought to our attention after the fact some hundred pages later. It is as if the prose is conspiring to hide from Newland and the reader the fact that is increasingly obvious to anyone but him – the extent to which he loves Ellen. Newland might be discovering a life beyond society’s rules, but the yellow roses provide a potent symbol of the fact that in both cases he is carried by forces beyond his control – society in the first case, his subconscious in the second.

New York

New York dominates the novel – it is mentioned on near-enough every page. It is a totality, or at least seems to be. Yet this, too, is only a perspective that the novel seeks to shake. When May’s family go for a holiday to Florida, her father insists on trying to remake a little section of New York in their lodgings there. This is patently ridiculous – it makes New York look silly, shows how silly it is when removed from the environment that protects it. At the same time, it shows how important that environment was – how protective, to its inhabitants. When Ellen and Archer meet privately, it almost requires them to be somewhere else – a carriage or country estate, for example. In terms of the novel’s perspectives, one thing we might take from this is that New York’s restrictiveness actually works successfully to control everyone, so long as they are there. To me, the climax of the novel is when Newland tries to say goodbye to Ellen before she heads back to Europe, only to find that New York, in the figure of May, has already arranged for her to travel in a friend’s carriage. 

Limitations

We see through Newland’s eyes. We see the frustration of his life in New York, once he wants what it cannot give him. But just as we saw with the flowers, he is limited. Even the most powerful image of the book reveals that limitation: “He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?” Striking, but even when he thinks outside the system of his city, Newland is still taking the image from another, not quite thinking for himself.

We think May is like this, because Newland repeatedly considers her so – a mere “type”, absent of agency. But the novel’s penultimate chapter, where May sends off her rival without ever openly acknowledging it, is startling because it is here where, after noticing the importance of perspective as we read, Wharton makes it clear that we’ve only seen a fragment of the whole. May, her eyes “wet with victory” in the undeclared battle, has indeed acted independently to surprise Newland with the personality he hadn’t supposed she had. Even though that personality’s distinguishing characteristic is to ally itself with the existing powers of New York, it is still much more a something than the nothing he assumed. Hence his failure to achieve the conclusion with Ellen that he had hoped for.

The Final Chapter

In its final chapter, The Age of Innocence leaves us with a kind of mystery to ponder. I first read the novel over ten years ago now, and all I remembered in the years since was that the ending had left me feeling that there was something strange going on. That may well have been my total inexperience of romance, which meant I had no way of understanding Newland’s actions. Taking place nearly thirty years after the main events of the novel, this epilogue shows the consequences of Newland’s choice – if choice it quite was – of May over Ellen. He has achieved the worldly success that sticking in his place in society promised him, including professional recognition and beautiful children. He has also, in a way, come to terms with his life. “It did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty.”

After May’s passing Newland’s son takes him to Paris. It is here that Ellen now lives. She sends a note to the Archers’ hotel when she learns of their arrival, inviting them both to her, but on the street the father hesitates, in the end only his son goes upstairs to her rooms. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up”, is how he puts it to himself. And then he goes back to his hotel.

Young Angus could not understand him. Older Angus, perhaps, can take a slightly more appreciative view. But still, it’s another moment where the novel seems to be doing something with perspective that’s not at all clear. We’ve gone through the whole of The Age of Innocence watching Newland and Ellen restraining themselves, making sacrifices for the good of a society that neither quite likes nor believes in. That society has done nothing to commend itself to us. Now, both of them are free to be together, free of that society, but even now, Newland still chooses to remain with a memory, rather than a reality.

It is perhaps some comment on human desires. The way that we want until the moment we have. Perhaps Newland, whose first recorded thoughts about May in the book use the distinctive word “possessorship”, has decided that having something real is no longer worth the trouble. Better to enjoy the dream, undiminished. The next generation are much freer than he and Ellen had been – his son is an architect, a profession that would not have been acceptable in Newland’s youth for a man of his background. By choosing not to see Ellen, I suppose we can say that Newland is choosing to protect the idea of his life, even with its bad parts, as having been the right choice. Perhaps this sense of justification is fragile enough that meeting the countess might throw him off course. 

Perhaps the restrictions of the past – the absence of the telephone or relatively rapid transatlantic crossings – meant a heightened receptivity to what ultimately was perceived. The glance felt across the room back then was more keenly felt than the softest press of lip on lip is today. I don’t know; the novel does not know either. Newland’s justification seems rooted in fear. The novel’s portrayal of his world is too negative to redeem at the last moment. May may surprise Newland, and indeed us readers, when she steps up to ensure she gets her marriage and the life she wants, but her perspective is not enough to save the society. I came out of the book marvelling at its technical proficiency, which truly is worth studying; yet after writing this blog post, I’m marvelling also at this mystery, which still remains so to me, of what exactly it seems to want to say.

I suppose I’ll keep pondering these questions until the next time I return to it. 

Two “Losers” – Bellow’s Seize the Day and Eisenberg’s A Real Pain

Recently, I happened to read a novel about one loser and shortly afterwards watch a movie about another. In Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, we have one day in the life of a man, friendless and in crisis. Meanwhile, in Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain the focus is on two brothers on a memory tour of Poland, both of whom are in their own ways losers. What is interesting, in both works, is the way the stories frame their losers. In both, but in different ways, we are made to challenge and ultimately modify our understanding of how these characters really live, and who among them really deserves to be called a loser.

Saul Bellow’s short novel Seize the Day is the second of the writer’s works which I have read, after Herzog. It follows Tommy Wilhelm at the height of his midlife crisis (wife gone, job gone, money gone, aging tyrant father decidedly not gone) as everything comes together to slap him spectacularly in the face one fine day in 1950s Manhattan. Wilhelm is gullible, innocent, naïve, and totally incompatible with his world.

We can contrast Wilhelm with Benji Kaplan, from Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain. Also innocent, also emotional, also Jewish, the key difference between the portrayals of him and Bellow’s hero is the worlds these luckless figures wander in. In Eisenberg’s film, Benji and his brother David are on a Holocaust tour in Poland. Where Tommy’s environment conspired to crush him, Benji’s encourages us to view him more positively – at least at first – as he charms the viewer and other characters with his positive, can-do attitude.

Seize the Day

Tommy Wilhelm is a loser. “The type that loses the girl”, he is told by a potential movie agent, he has signed over control of his last few hundred dollars to a charlatan to invest in lard, and he has lost his wife and children and his work. The reasons for this are not too complicated. The man is delusional, naïve, childish. When a sprinkle of nepotism means he needs to share his job with a director’s relative, Wilhelm resigns without a backup plan. When his wife demands he pay huge amounts of money for maintenance without letting him get a divorce, he just reaches for his chequebook. When Dr Tamkin, a (quack) psychiatrist, tells him to sign over his money to him to invest for a huge return, of course he does that too. He is “a man who reflected long and then made the decision he had rejected twenty separate times.”

The narration of Seize the Day reflects Wilhelm’s own failure and hardly ever seems willing to give him a break. Listen to the brilliant opening:

“When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor – no, not quite, an extra – and he knew what acting should be. Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels. He came from the twenty-third floor down to the lobby on the mezzanine to collect his mail before breakfast and he believed – he hoped – that he looked passably well: doing all right. It was a matter of sheer hope, because there was not much that he could add to his present effort.”

Whenever we have a statement, we backtrack. “No, not quite”, “he hoped”, “so at least he thought.” Here is a narration that is hostile to Wilhelm’s delusions and never lets them stay for long. It laughs at poor Tommy by refusing to do him the littlest courtesy – that of letting him off the hook for being wrong by not mentioning it. At one point later in the book he has a disastrous phone call and gets so upset he flees the booth, but not before the narrator can step in to tell us how he left most of his remaining coinage just sitting there on the side.

The narration seems cruel, but quite quickly we see that it’s also the whole world around Wilhelm that is cruel. During the novel, Wilhelm is staying in the same hotel as his father. This man, in his eighties, seems to have chosen a form of existence similar to dried meat – by removing all moisture, or in his case kindness, from himself he has prolonged his own life. Wilhelm desperately needs his father’s financial support, or even emotional support. Instead, the man is all rugged individualism – “carry nobody on your back.” Not even, as it turns out, your own children. Besides the father, there’s Wilhelm’s wife, and Dr Tamkin, who eventually absconds with all the money Wilhelm has left.

Central to the novel is the idea of the market, where Wilhelm gambles away his savings on lard futures. It is here that Wilhelm is a loser in the purest sense – in a game of luck, he has none of it. But the market also represents that unkind, cold world. Its movements are, to Wilhelm, utterly unpredictable. It seems also to be connected to violence – Mr Rappaport, one of the characters there, has made his fortune slaughtering chickens – and, furthermore, it is totally inescapable. The market creeps into the language of the book, with money as a proxy for status (one of the only times Wilhelm’s father seems a little uncomfortable is when he has to lie about Wilhelm’s employment history to big him up), but it goes further than that. We read that Wilhelm has failed at the “business of life”. Regardless of whether you place the emphasis in that phrase on the first or third word, it’s true. But we might also add that if life itself is a “business”, then there’s no way ever to escape the market – it truly is all-pervasive.

Everyone laughs at the loser Wilhelm, so obviously unsuitable for the world. Those laughing includes the reader too, for Seize the Day is a hugely funny book. But then, some two thirds of the way through the book and just as the humiliations are piling up so high we almost can’t see over the top of them, something shifts and the narration begins to change. A few days earlier, we learn, Wilhelm had a kind of revelation, one of those “subway things”: “a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast.” It doesn’t last, but he remembers it. Just like he remembers God, who lurks in prayers at the ends of chapters when things are really bad. The revelation connects Wilhelm to something authentic and higher, which nobody else in the book has any knowledge of.

Wilhelm is flawed and deluded, but so is everyone else. His father rejects him, his wife rejects him, his trusted investment partner runs with the money. All of these people choose to disconnect and trap themselves within their own sensibilities. But only Wilhelm connects with others through his heart, however briefly. It is he who ends the book sobbing over a stranger’s body, something it is impossible to imagine any other character doing. For that, he appears more noble, even if it comes as his abjection reaches its peak, than all the rest.

A Real Pain

In A Real Pain, through the cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David Kaplan (Eisenberg himself), we have another treatment of the idea of a loser, or failure in life. In the movie, the cousins come together to go on a tour of Poland’s Jewish legacy using some money left by their grandmother Dory after her death. Where Wilhelm is alone and competing against an ideal and successful version of himself, the central dynamic in A Real Pain is the real comparison between the two cousins. David is married, with a child and a high-paying job. (Albeit one – working with advertising banners – which Benji is quick to dismiss.) In comparison, Benji is emotionally variable, pot-smoking, and not quite employed.

Of the two, Benji is the obvious loser, with David the sensible family man. Money is less important than in Seize the Day, but it’s still there – Benji is a failure because he cannot hold down a job, David a success because he has a good one. The conversation where Benji dismisses David’s occupation is one of the film’s first ones, just as the one where Benji talks about his future employment without reference to anything more concrete than helping out a friend is one of the film’s last ones.

With the two men this idea of “loser” is questioned almost immediately in a way that it never is in Bellow’s novel. At one of the first scenes in Poland, at a memorial to the Warsaw Uprising, Benji runs and poses next to the sculptures in a way that David considers disrespectful and hence cannot fathom doing himself. Yet with his positive attitude and ebullient personality, Benji persuades the other guests on the tour to join him in a little reenactment, with David left – alone – holding the camera. If Benji is a loser, this is a strange idea of one. It is serious, dorky, David, who is left out.

This line of argument – that the intellectually or financially less blessed may yet be talented or wonderful in their own way – is not new. But rather than labouring it, A Real Pain takes the topic in another direction. Much like Wilhelm, in a number of incidents Benji appears naïve, inarticulate, emotional. When the tour travels to Lublin he complains about them being in a first-class coach, when fewer than a hundred years ago people like them would be herded like cattle into the train’s rear compartments and sent to their deaths. Then, at a cemetery, he complains to the guide that he doesn’t want to hear any facts and that instead they should be silent. He feels strongly, but his delivery turns the others in the group a little against him. At a dinner where he once again unnerves everyone before leaving to the bathroom, David confesses that Benji had tried to end his own life only a few months before – further evidence that his charm is only one side of a more complex and tragic figure.

A Real Pain is not ultimately Benji’s story. Like Wilhelm, he rages, he shows his positive sides, but by the end of the film he is exactly where he was when the story began – sitting in an airport. In this sense, regardless of whether loser is the right word for him, Benji stays one. David, the mirror – awkward, jealous of his cousin’s charm – is instead the person who grows. He comes to realise two things. The first is that he should not question his own life too much – he has a family, he has his job. One of the final scenes has him coming home to that happy little world, in contrast to Benji’s continued loafing around at the airport. David, in other words, has a destination. The second thing that David realises is that he must do more to help Benji, but he cannot save him on his own. That is the significance both of his inviting Benji to come round for dinner in the closing moments – and of his acceptance of Benji’s decision to stay at the airport instead.

Whether you want to call these works stories about losers or use a more nuanced term, the fact remains that for all their humour and wit, the strugglers stay where they are. Benji doesn’t grow, and while Wilhelm might feel connected to the world and have demonstrated to the reader that he’s a decent chap, he still ends with no money left and little prospect of getting some besides selling his car. The narration in both works doesn’t try to save these people from themselves – perhaps the creators thought that would be cheap. Instead, it shows them to be complex, human, individuals through both their flaws and good qualities.

The growth is elsewhere. In Seize the Day, it is for the reader, seeing the bad cruel world surrounding Wilhelm; while in A Real Pain it’s mainly for David, who sees that he was not the loser after all.

Concluding Comments

Your blogger is neither very experienced at writing about film nor at doing comparisons like this. To be honest, it feels a disservice to works that are both individually worth reading and seeing to give them each half a post! For example, given both are, at least in the background (in the Bellow), about Jewishness, I haven’t given it nearly enough space as I perhaps should have.

Then, with Bellow, there’s the prose. Plenty of people have said Bellow has great prose, but I really noticed it here and would have loved to delve more into that. Here’s just one shockingly lovely sentence:

“Light as a locust, a helicopter bringing mail from Newark Airport to La Guardia sprang over the city in a long leap.”

It does nothing except make you swoon.

I also would have wanted to write more about Dr Tamkin, who is one of the funniest characters I have yet encountered in fiction. Again, the pleasure would be in letting him speak for himself, rather than actually talking about what he had to say. (Bellow comes the Nabokov school of anti-psychoanalysis, which quite frankly is not interesting to me at all, so long after people have stopped taking Freud seriously except in literature departments.)

Still, both works are fun and interesting, and I hope I’ve succeeded in commending them to you.

Alice Munro – Dear Life

I bought my copy of Dear Life, the last collection of short stories by the late Canadian writer Alice Munro, right about when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013 (one of the first times a writer of short stories had received that honour). I must have read a few of the stories then, not enjoyed or understood them, and set the book aside. On a whim I brought it back with me to Germany, hoping that being a bit older and wiser might help me understand things, and sure enough devoured it in a week.

It’s a hard thing to write about, though. Munro’s stories seem technically simple compared to other writers, where I’m always dotting the pages with marginal notes. Despite this simplicity, you read one page at a time with the ease of a bird gliding and then suddenly, probably at the end, she tries to leave you devastated and usually succeeds.

There are even few images to get excited about. The only one I remember, of “evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears”, I did not like.

Instead, one of Munro’s key skills on a sentence-by-sentence level seems her ability to find a sharp way of phrasing those moments that change a life: “”Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry but now is not going to marry me.“ Or “That was one of  the few times that I saw him act like a father.”

With such sentences, you get the impression that she has worked hard at her stories, unlike others who mask relative laziness with sheer talent or genius. It takes a lot of effort, hours of chiselling and sanding, to make such unobtrusive workaday prose. Or rather, prose that we cannot distinguish from other simple prose except when it is too late, and it has already delivered its broadside against the unprepared soul.

My favourite of the stories here is “Amundsen”, from which the bear image comes. Its story goes as follows. A young woman arrives to teach at a clinic for children with diseases like tuberculosis, out in rural Canada. She falls in love with Alister, the director, and they arrange to get married. Something happens, however, and they do not. The narrator is set on a train and leaves. Years later she sees Alister again, but barely has time to say hello.

Taken as a whole, “Amundsen” reminds me a little bit of Chekhov’s “House with the Mezzanine” with its sense of a relationship that does not go anywhere. Chekhov’s realist innovation (one of them) was that he translated his observation of unfulfilled promises within individuals’ lives into his fiction. Munro, often called the Canadian Chekhov, gains much of her own atmosphere of reality from this same thing. She is, like Chekhov, a great writer of the fudged life.

The pivotal moment in “Amundsen” is the scene when, having left the clinic to get married in a far off town, the mood suddenly shifts between the couple and they head back, acknowledging that everything is over. Here is that shift in mood. The couple have just eaten, and now the narrator has plucked up the courage to put on a nice dress she had saved especially:

When I come out Alister stands up to greet me and smiles and squeezes my hand and says I look pretty.

We walk stiffly back to the car, holding hands. He opens the car door for me, goes around and gets in, settles himself and turns the key in the ignition, then turns it off.

The car is parked in front of a hardware store. Shovels for snow removal are on sale at half price. There is still a sign in the window that says skates can be sharpened inside.

Across the street there is a wooden house painted an oily yellow. Its front steps have become unsafe and two boards forming an X have been nailed across them.

The truck parked in front of Alister’s car is a prewar model, with a runningboard and a fringe of rust on its fenders. A man in overalls comes out of the hardware store and gets into it. After some engine complaint, then some rattling and bouncing in place, it is driven away. Now a delivery truck with the store’s name on it tries to park in the space left vacant. There is not quite enough room. The driver gets out and comes and raps on Alister’s window. Alister is surprised—if he had not been talking so earnestly he would have noticed the problem. He rolls down the window and the man asks if we are parked there because we intend to buy something in the store. If not, could we please move along?

“Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me. “We were just leaving.”

We. He has said we. For a moment I cling to that word. Then I think it’s the last time. The last time I’ll be included in his we.

It’s not the “we” that matters, that is not what tells me the truth. It’s his male-to-male tone to the driver, his calm and reasonable apology. I could wish now to go back to what he was saying before, when he did not even notice the van trying to park. What he was saying then had been terrible but his tight grip on the wheel, his grip and his abstraction and his voice had pain in them. No matter what he said and meant, he spoke out of the same deep place then, that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man. He rolls up the window and gives his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot and moving it so as not to come in contact with the van.

And a moment later I would be glad even to go back to that time, when he craned his head to see behind him. Better that than driving—as he is driving now—down the main street of Huntsville, as if there is no more to be said or managed.

I can’t do it, he has said.

He has said that he can’t go through with this.

He can’t explain it.

Only that it’s a mistake.

The first time I read it, I was shocked by the news that everything was over. (Shocked by the suddenness, but also because I wanted the marriage to happen.) Yet when we look back over the extract, there are no clues that things are going wrong of the sort that another clever short-story writer might feel compelled to leave. Even going back further, the occasional unkindnesses of the story, such as when the narrator and Alister skip the play of a school-aged friend, Mary, are not “gotcha” moments that we can use to explain what comes later. Adults preferring to spend time together over a meal to watching a performance that will probably be no good is hardly a cardinal sin we cannot ever imagine ourselves committing.

Instead, though we do have words like “stiffly” and the perhaps insufficiently thoughtful “pretty”, the passage before the revelation strikes us by having nothing to do with the marriage at all. We have a “wooden house” and the “hardware store.” It takes us until the man tapping on the window, and the knowledge that Alister is “talking so earnestly”, for us to realise that the reason we are focusing on everything else but what is taking place within the car is that the narrator herself wants to focus on anything else but that. Rather than the text reflecting the narrator’s internal voice, a la free indirect discourse, instead, we have the text reflecting the narrator’s very thoughts. It’s pretty cool, but also the kind of unflashy trick typical of Munro which it took me a second pass to notice. 

We never learn the reason that things collapse between them. Ultimately, it does not matter. Perhaps this is another thing Munro has the right to allow herself – a lack of an explanation. As in relationships, often the only explanation for a break-up is the one that we come up with, alone at night.

Another trick worth borrowing is the use of dialogue without quotes, as at the end of the extract. By placing it in the text in this way the finality, the unchangeability of the fact is emphasised, as against the dialogue within quotation marks which still has this element of hope. I think this is important to note because it can be easy to get sucked into quite a conservative way of thinking, particularly on “realistic” things, which considers that every innovation has already taken place. I know I’m guilty of it. But dialogue is more than just words in quotes. (Just as, for the Sally Rooneys and James Joyces of this world, it can be more than words without quotes!) Dialogue can be silences, like “…”, or shock “!?”, and so on. This may seem rather dreadful to some of my readers, but I think that such a way of writing “dialogue” could be more effective now than the more traditional “She went silent”. Show, not tell, we are told, after all.

Reading the stories in Dear Life is at once a joy and a sadness and a consolation for this blogger. A joy, because they are damn good. A sadness, because I know how vastly far ahead of anything I could ever notice, let alone write down, Munro’s knowledge of human nature is. And a consolation, because that previous statement is at least a little silly. More and more, whether as a psychological defence (you will still be a good writer, don’t give up!) or as a rational position, I’m coming to see how challenging it is to write good stories when you are young. I felt this many years ago, when I literally could not write any kind of time gap in my stories – not even, really, a week – because it felt like I hadn’t lived long enough to perceive time in that way. But still now, when I have lived long enough to allow for a changing of the seasons, I see that I have not seen enough of life’s stages to really write the kind of modern story that rolls itself out slowly, in fits and starts, like modern lives do.

Of course, there remain plenty of stories for the young, but not ones about whole lives. And it is precisely this kind of story that Munro chooses for her own in most of Dear Life. At around eighty when these stories came out, she was certainly entitled to it. But it’s still a surprise, and a powerful one, when we read in a story that began in the time of the Second World War, the news that characters are reaching out to one another over “email”.

I think I might have to live a lot longer to write something like that.