The second read of my Nobel Prize-winning Author Project was a bit of a cheat. After all, my aim with the project is supposedly to discover new authors whom I would normally consider too fancy for me. Nevertheless, I selected Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro, although I had already read her short story collection Too Much Happiness. Munro was a pretty safe bet, in other words, because I already knew that I enjoy her writing. Sort of.
My experiences with Too Much Happiness were mixed. It started out with the short story "Dimensions" which I really liked but which gave me a false impression of what a typical Munro short story would look like. The main character in "Dimensions" is living on autopilot after a terrible tragedy, but is brought back to life as it were by a dramatic, cathartic event. I expected more in the same vein, but cathartic events proved few and far between in the other stories. Near-misses, occasions that could have been momentous but don't quite come off, are more Munro's thing, and the prevailing tone is one of mild regret. Disappointed, I put the book aside for a long while when I reached the story "Face". A boy with a birthmark and a father who hates him – could it get more depressing?
When I gave the book another chance it turned out that the story, although not exactly cheerful, wasn't as depressing as I'd thought. It struck me then that although life could often have turned out better for Munro's characters, it could also have turned out a great deal worse. Sometimes something truly horrific happens, as in the chillingly convincing "Child's Play", but mostly pitch-dark tragedies like the one in "Dimensions" are absent, which makes it easier to do without the subsequent uplift.
When I stopped expecting the dramatic highs and lows of "Dimensions", I started to appreciate what can really make Munro a joy to read: the clear, precise, prose. I'm usually the barbaric kind of reader who pays more attention to character and plot than language. If I have a preference when it comes to the prose of "literary" fiction, it tends towards the flowery rather than the refined (think Dickens and Balzac). And yet Munro's style, apparently simple but full of astute observation and flowing easily along without long knotty sentences, won me over. I read the end of Who Do You Think You Are? during a plane journey, when I usually don't have the patience to focus on anything more demanding than chick-lit, and it went really well – I also found myself more relaxed than when I'm bound up in the stress-inducing problems of chick-lit heroines.
Who Do You Think You Are? is described by its blurb to be a "collection of stories" which "reads like a novel". My first reaction to this was: "Well, that's because it is". The interlinked stories follow the same protagonist, Rose, chronologically, highlighting some events first during her girlhood, then in adult life. It's hard not to think of the stories as novel chapters. They do seem to build off each other, and characters such as Rose and her stepmother Flo aren't reintroduced in every story, which makes me wonder how well they would function as independent short stories out of their context. But maybe we are told just enough about the characters in each particular story to follow what happens within its framework. In any case, it's far preferable to read the stories as a collection: you get a much clearer picture of Rose and the people closest to her.
Who Do You Think You Are? has the secondary title "Stories of Flo and Rose", and Rose's relationship to Flo proves to be the most important in the book. It's an odd one: they are close, and mean a lot to each other, and yet Rose never thinks of Flo as her mother, in spite of Flo marrying her father and taking over the care of her when Rose was still a baby. Flo is rarely referred to as a stepmother either, and when it happens it's mostly when Rose explains the nature of their relationship to an outsider. To Rose, Flo is just Flo. She makes a good job of raising Rose generally, but her complaints also lead to Rose's father beating his daughter up for the first time – something which then becomes a regular occurrence, until he dies when Rose is still a teenager. Another source of tension, though not as much as one could have expected, is that Flo clings to a way of life that Rose is desperate to get away from.
This collection was originally called The Beggar Maid after another of its stories, then renamed Who Do You Think You Are? after the last short story which takes place in West Hanratty, where Rose grew up in a slummy neighbourhood. I can't help thinking The Beggar Maid is a punchier title; after all, the double meaning of Who Do You Think You Are? has been explored in a well-known TV programme with the same title where famous people have a look at their family history (though Munro's collection probably predates it). Still, as the short story "The Beggar Maid" describes how a wealthy young man, Patrick, falls in love with Rose and what it leads to, this title does shift the focus away from Flo and West Hanratty, and Rose's relationships to various men prove less central to her than that to her stepmother. She has a few typically Munro-ian near-misses man-wise, but by this time I took it philosophically, and true enough, when Rose catches up with the same men later it proves that maybe they were not all that. Only once did I feel a bit sad when a relationship ended prematurely, on account of something that could easily just have been a misunderstanding.
Rose isn't always likeable, but she is believable, and Who Do You Think You Are? is well worth reading – though less because of Rose or even the colourful Flo than the beautiful way it's written. Vargas Llosa had other qualities, but I didn't admire his prose style much (maybe something was lost in translation); at my sceptical early stage of reading The Feast of the Goat, when I came to a particularly clumsy piece of exposition, I thought uncharitably: "I can't believe he won the Nobel Prize". No such thoughts come to mind when you read Munro. She deserved that prize.
