Dear Life - Alice Munro

How differently I experience art is dependent on the art I have recently experienced. In the last couple of months I've read lots of SF and fantasy so reading this felt bewildering. It took me about three stories to orientate myself. And then it kind of feels like the very best historical fiction. The fabric of everyday life - work, family, relationships - is sometimes slowly ripping, sometimes ripped violently, sometimes cut, sometimes stitched up. You experience it in all its difference: characters living in a different social reality to ours: (most often) the fifties, sixties and seventies small town Canada with change in the air but conservative social ideas still dominant. You're never shown what to think, though you recognise tragedy, injustice, insensitivity and a thoroughgoing carelessness with (other character's) feelings. The women are often trapped or reaching and straining for more, whilst the men...the men are living their lives in ways they are accustomed to, with all the privilege and fecklessness that implies. The women aren't always breaking free exactly, rather than searching for (new) answers, whilst the men are confined by social norms (pride, cruelty, egotism, fear), and (often) try to confine others, because they (still) feel powerful and set.

It repeatedly reminded me of Carla Lane's 70s melancholic comedy masterpiece Butterflies (mainly without the comedy). And that is the highest praise.

I can also see why Gwendoline Riley loves Munro so much. Characters are weird and distinct, yet ordinary. The sadness and pensiveness they experience is often fraught and distressingly awkward. The manipulation of time in these stories, years or decades in a paragraph or page, guides the reader to witness existences of limited expectations, small decisions that set lives in motion and staggering bravery. Adversity is everywhere but the stories illuminate their characters in a bright light so we can witness their survival and perseverance in all their wonder