I know a lot of readers love to absorb themselves in a thick, juicy novel. I’m not one of them. I do enjoy a good novel, but I’m partial to the short story. As a writer, I prefer to write short fiction. Thankfully, writers like Alice Munro have given us a stellar example of how a writer of fiction can achieve success without ever writing a novel.
A masterful storyteller and perhaps the greatest writer of fiction in the past 50 years, Alice Munro died Monday, May 13, 2024, at age 92.
Born in 1931 to chicken farmer in rural Ontario, Canada, Munro’s stories were firmly rooted in that milieu and experience. While some criticized her work as being too banal and ordinary — “founded on forms and subjects traditionally disregarded by the literary mainstream,” as The Guardian’s obituary describes it — her persistence led to the ultimate literary distinction, the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature at age 82.
More high-profile writers sang her praises, The Guardian reports.
Margaret Atwood once called her “among the major writers of English fiction of our time.” Salman Rushdie praised her as “a master of the form” while Jonathan Franzen once wrote: “[Munro] is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”
As a 2003 Guardian article described her work:
She writes of turkey gutting and fox farming, of trees felled in the Ontario wilderness, of harsh country schools and lingering illnesses, of familiar violence and obscure shame, and above all, of the lives of girls and women. And while these things have perhaps made her less well known than she should be, and the predictable sods have been flung – that her concerns are domestic, narrow, regional, dated, that she only writes short stories – hers is a story of triumph over such petty assumptions.
Bringing the ‘dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable’ to life
Unlike many short story writers who — for better or worse — eventually write a novel, Munro stuck with the form that brought her success.
Not that she didn’t try. She described her effort to The Guardian but concluded the novel-in-progress “didn’t have life. It didn’t have punch. Something about it was flabby.”
“She split it up into a collection of linked stories, Lives of Girls and Women, which was published in 1971 and offered a portrait of the artist as a young girl as its narrator, Del, grows up and begins to write in a small Ontario town,” The Guardian reports. “The novel served almost as a manifesto for Munro’s own work: Del abandons the gothic novel she had been working on and turns to the ‘dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable’ lives around her in Jubilee, describing ‘every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.'”
If you want to become a better writer, I suggest you read some of her short stories. Thanks to LitHub, you can read 25 Alice Munro short stories online, for free, right now.
Image via SomosMass99.mx.
Andy writes! 