The different ages of women
Anita Brookner
FRIEND OF MY YOUTH by Alice Munro
Chatto & Windus, £13.99, pp. 273.
Alice Munro made a legitimate con- quest with her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, some 20 years ago. Further collections — Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, The Beggar Maid, The Moons of Jupiter, and The Progress of Love — confirmed her excel- lence and her mastery of the form. Even her novel, Lives of Girls and Women, was really a collection of stories, strung together chronologically. And it is chrono- logy which intrigues her, that mysterious process which turns young persons into adults, marries and divorces them, gives them children and lovers, and sends them home again, sometimes to tend dying parents, sometimes to clear things out of the attic before they move on. Old friends, much changed, are encountered at various stages of this journey: all have stories to tell. The narrator, or protagonist, is invari- ably a woman, with a woman's brooding consciousness.
These essentially female confidences are quiet and unshowy. They contrast in all respects with the attention-seeking devices of most male writers, with their restless- ness and their formal innovations. The bleakly home-loving world in which Alice Munro operates is uneventful, physically uncomfortable, filled with small but famil- iar treacheries, treacheries which are for- given or forgotten by women who were once girls at school together, Husbands are shadowy, lovers downmarket and unreli-
able. Enormous progress is made from icy farms to opulent houses, in which pitchers of sangria are taken from refrigerators and lavish fantasy gardens are planned and planted. But home remains that little township, and those frozen mornings, and those brief mosquito-ridden summers down by the lake. Homesickness has been mastered, but not quite accepted. Flat, transparent prose absorbs the hurts. Mothers sicken and die again and again, but growing up means caution, watchful- ness — not quite peace.
It now appears that Miss Munro is working through the different ages of women, from intensely realised childhood and abashed adolescence to equally wide- eyed but weary middle age. In Friend of My Youth we have reached the stage that in a lesser writer would amount to disillu- sionment. Her tone is so sure and her control so absolute that she achieves what few other contemporary writers could achieve, a detachment devoid of rancour. Few of these lives are successful, but none of them is harrowing, ugly, hurtful. Middle age is perhaps more barren territory than youth, or so it would seem in this slightly darker collection. The effect is not so much disappointing as intriguing: one hopes still to be reading her when her girls and women approach the end of their lives. This is a subject which she alone, of all living writers, will deal with effectively.
In the present collection the narrator is a woman alone, with a certain mileage be- hind her; her husbands and lovers have not quite displaced earlier memories and im- pressions. She is contrasted with pluckier, wealthier, or quite simply more ruthless friends, women who have unexpectedly done well for themselves, although they gave no sign that they were in a position to do so. The sober opening story of Ellie and Flora sets the tone. Ellie and Flora were sisters. Flora was engaged to Robert, who worked on the farm; Ellie was the wild and silly girl who jumped out on them from behind bushes. Flora bore no grudge when Ellie became pregnant by Robert, but merely divided up the house so they could all live decently together, and read to her sister as she declined into a bedridden misery. When Ellie became seriously ill, or when her malingering turned into genuine invalidism, a nurse was installed. After Ellie's death friends happily forecast that at least Robert could marry Flora. He married the nurse, of course. Flora made over the house to them, moved to town, and got a job as a shop assistant. What kind of an assistant, in what kind of a shop, is left unclear. The narrator broods on this question, which may be important. In this way each marvellous story is open-ended, as if life cannot quite be contained within these fragile and arbitrary bounds. And this is how it should be.
Matilda Butler, whose beautiful looks intrigued her childhood friend Joan, has declined into dottiness, let her hair grow out, become sharp when she was once all acquiescence, but Joan cannot quite attend to this matter because she is waiting for a letter from her lover. Giorgia visits her old friend Maya's house to find the widower married to a younger blonde wife — but Giorgia is still preoccupied with the one major deception her dead friend visited on her. Anita comes home to find scornful Margot married to the man who used to drive the school bus; she has become the owner of the refrigerator containing the sangria, and other delights. Time and again life has quietly and surprisingly devised combinations other than those which might confidently have been expected.
I first read these stories in the New Yorker, where they stealthily took over from jokier voices. The peculiar poignancy of earlier collections may be lacking, for the mother figure, so dominant there, is largely absent. Thus Friend of My Youth is less painful than Lives of Girls and Women, and may safely be given to new readers. They will quickly be subjugated. There are few women writing today who earn such instant respect.
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