I first became a committed partisan of Munro when she won the Nobel Prize and friends of mine complained that Roth should have won instead. I read Dear Life and I thought the first two stories, “To Reach Japan” and “Amundsen,” were much better than Roth’s late novels, even at what a novel vs. a story is supposed to do. The WWII sanitarium in “Amundsen,” socio-political context and all is conjured far more convincingly in the thirty pages of Amundsen than Newark and its 1944 polio epidemic is in the three hundred pages Nemesis. She makes Roth seem extremely sentimental; the precise description of class relations at the piano factory in “Carried Away” vs. the boring glove factory in American Pastoral (where the Black worker tells the boss that it is our factory, you just own it) is a case in point. Munro also makes Roth seem sentimental about sex, although her way of being unsentimental about sex should give anybody pause.

When the Munro scandal broke, Mary Gaitskill was I think the only person who found words equal to the occasion; not coincidentally she is the only Munro fan I know who realized the significance of “Vandals” before the biographical importance of that story was known. I hope she reads my essay, which is in part a response to her writing.