TFT Review: Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

(Editor’s note: This review was published in September after its Canadian release. We are featuring it again today for its American release.)

After 78 years of life, 14 collections of short stories, and prizes too numerous to list, it’s not surprising that Canadian writer Alice Munro should turn her attention towards old age and death. The characters that populate the 10 stories of her latest collection, Too Much Happiness: Stories, are mostly women—though a few are men—who are not yet incapacitated by old age, but who have many more years behind them than they have ahead. Thoughts of mortality have crept into much of Munro’s work over the years; in this case, however, death not only lurks in the dark spaces of her stories, but prowls the better-lit areas as well.

For the most part, however, it is life and its capacity for complexity and surprise that Munro is interested in exploring, rather than the straightforward inevitability of its end. Through her characters’ soul-searching recollections, Munro captures the sharp essence of childhood as convincingly as she does the more self-conscious texture of maturity, and stories such as “Face” and “Child’s Play” eerily reanimate the flavor of early life experience. Between the poles of childhood and old age, Munro illustrates the personal transformations that arrive unanticipated (though they may seem inevitable in hindsight), and which may still be succeeded by further evolutions, in spite of advancing age.

For Joyce, the protagonist of the suggestively titled “Fiction,” reading about herself in a story by a former student leads her to contemplate her inconceivable journey from a heartbroken, rejected wife (”Her life gone. A commonplace calamity,” the narrator dryly remarks) to the matriarch of a large clan. For Sally, the protagonist of “Deep-Holes,” the recent death of her husband and an impossible relationship with her estranged son herald a future that is bleak, yet redeemed by its remaining possibilities. “And it was possible, too, that age could be her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet.”

Leaving aside the unusual self-reflexiveness of “Fiction,” Munro’s writing is characterized here, as elsewhere, by a closely clipped realism, streaked with the violence and trauma that have led some critics to apply the academically opportunistic title of “Southern Ontario Gothic.” And indeed, from children who are murdered (”Dimensions”) to children who murder (”Child’s Play”), there are plenty of flinch-worthy moments.

The title story of this collection, however, is of a different variety, although it too involves an untimely death. It tells the story of Sophia Kovalevsky, a 19^th century Russian mathematician and novelist who broke the gender barrier by becoming a full professor at Stockholm University, only to die of influenza at the age of 41. While there is no mitigating the tragedy of her early death, the sense of euphoric intellectual illumination that Munro accords Kovalevsky’s final hours suggests that even in life’s last minutes, there is still time for rebirth.

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Too Much Happiness was released by Douglas Gibson Books on August 25th in Canada.

It will be released by Knopf on November 17th in the United States.

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