Tag Archives: One Bright Book

On Reading Alice Munro Now

Posted on by under close reading, personal, review, Uncategorized

We devoted Episode 45 of One Bright Book to Alive Munro’s Open Secrets. I wrote these remarks to introduce our conversation.

Andrew Wyeth, Day Dream, 1980

Hello and welcome to One Bright Book, the podcast where three friends real ALL the books, taking it one book at a time. My name is Dorian Stuber and I’m here as always with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, this time to discuss Alice Munro’s short story collection Open Secrets, first published in 1994.

Before we go any further, I want to give an important content warning. Today’s episode will contain discussions of sexual violence, abuse, and rape, specially the sexual abuse of children.

Our podcast has always been focused closely on whatever book we’ve chosen to talk about. We bring biography and critical reception and historical context into the conversation, but usually only as secondary approaches to our encounter with the text.

Today, I suspect, will be different.

The outlines of Munro’s career are well-known. Born in 1931 in southwestern Ontario, near Lake Huron, the setting of so many of her stories, Munro went to university on a scholarship but left after two years to move to British Columbia with her husband, James Munro. The couple started a bookstore which is still in business. The couple had three children, but the marriage was difficult and they divorced in 1972. Four years later, Munro married a man named Gerald Fremlin, a retired geographer who had served in the Air Force in WWII and with whom she lived on a farm in rural Ontario. Munro had started writing already in university; as a young mother on the west coast she focused on short stories, claiming it was the only form she had time for. That may be true, but it’s also the case that from the start she was preoccupied by the possibilities of the form. How much time can be contained in something “short”? How many points of view can it offer? How many different ways can it be constructed? Beginning with Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, Munro published 14 short story collections. As the years passed and the books accumulated, so too did her literary fame. The stories were published in places like The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, but above all in The New Yorker, where more than 60 first appeared.

She won many prizes, both in Canada and internationally, capped off by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. In her last years, she suffered from dementia, a fate prefigured by her mother’s experience with Parkinson’s and the subject of one of her most famous stories, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” At her death in 2024 she had settled into a position as a writer both lauded and loved: a grandmotherly figure whose stories were psychologically sharp and brilliantly structured.

That status was shattered a few months after her death when Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Gerald Fremlin, her stepfather, had sexually abused her starting in 1976, the year he married Munro: Skinner was 9 years old at the time. The abuse continued for several years. Skinner told Munro about it in 1992: after briefly separating from Fremlin, Munro returned to him, effectively choosing her husband over her child. In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence. The rest of the family, as well as others in Munro’s close personal and professional circle, including her Canadian publisher, knew what had happened to Skinner but kept quiet. Nobody knew, but a lot of people knew. It was an open secret.

I wanted to discuss Munro on the podcast because, as a Canadian and a reader, she has been in my life for a long time. The revelations of her failure as a parent adds so much complexity to what was, for me, already a complicated relationship. I first encountered her in junior high when we read her famous story “Boys and Girls,” from her debut collection. It’s about a girl whose father raises foxes for their pelts and whose ability to help with that work is curtailed by expectations of what a girl should be or do once she reaches puberty. I remember a note in our textbook, something about how the girl is like the foxes, how their pens symbolize the narrator’s own imprisonment. That interpretation, though in retrospect pretty obvious, made a big impression on me. It was one of the first times I thought of a story as something made, the first inkling I had of the truth that each text teaches its readers how to read it.

Later I would veer away from Munro. The more famous she got, the more she became a Canadian writer loved around the world, the more I looked at her askance. That’s just my own pigheaded personality, but I did find her, on the occasions when I read one of her stories, such a chilly writer, a bit heartless really. She seemed to me to epitomize the emotional detachment, even stuntedness of the white Anglo Protestant settler Canadian class. (Even though, in stories like “The Wilderness Station” in the collection we’ll be talking about, she is also a critic of that mindset, the more powerful for being of that world.) In her Nobel address she talks about growing up among Scots-Irish immigrants and their descendants, a world in which it was considered poor form to have an emotional life and even worse to admit to any accomplishments. The title of her collection Who Do You Think You Are summarized that world.

In more recent years I would often teach some of Munro’s stories and came increasingly to admire their richness and strangeness. They are made to be re-read, in my opinion. Then Andrea Skinner told her story. For me, there is no way to separate this part of Munro’s life from her work. After all, the stories are so often about bad things—moral wrong, pain, hurt, betrayal—lurking in plain sight. I chose Open Secrets as the collection for us to talk about because that phrase seems to be the motto of her whole work. And I was genuinely shocked when I read the last story in the book. It’s called “Vandals,” and it’s about a man who abuses two young children and his partner, the woman who failed to care for them. It’s probably useless to speculate on a writer’s motivations, but I really wonder what Munro was thinking when she wrote it. Was she processing? Gloating? Apologizing? Was she not thinking at all? It’s past time for me to finish this introduction, so I’ll only say that despite what we know now and without excusing her in any way, I find myself captivated by the stories. I don’t know what that says about me or how I feel about that. I do think it’s important that we talk about them and about her, even at the risk of causing further hurt to Andrea Skinner and the legions of other child victims. For if we don’t—if we stop reading Alice Munro or if we separate art from artist—then we are back in the world of half-told truths. We are back in that dangerous world of open secrets.

On Miaow

Posted on by under book review, review, self-promotion, Uncategorized

Here is my introduction to Episode 38 of the podcast I co-host with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, One Bright Book.

Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta, Preparation for a Bullfight (1903)

Our book today is Miaow, written in 1888 by the great Spanish 19th-century realist Benito Pérez Galdós and recently published by NYRB Classics in a lively new translation by Margaret Jull Costa.

Galdós, whose long and productive life lasted from 1843 – 1920, was born in the Canary Islands, which perhaps gave him an outsider’s perspective on the Madrid society he scrutinized in more than 80 novels.

Miaow has a cast of, well, maybe not thousands but a lot of characters. Ramón Villaamil has served the state his whole life, but he’s lost his job in the tax office due to changing political fortunes just two months short of qualifying for his pension. He solicits possible patrons and haunts his old office, not just to get a job but also to escape his household, where he lives in an uneasy truce with his wife, Doña Pura, their adult daughter, Abelarda, and his sister-in-law Milagros. Completing the ménage is Luis, the son of a second daughter who died young. Luis’s father is a man named Victor, a bad penny who has never been in the picture, indeed whose name is never spoken in the home. The novel kicks into gear when Victor turns up and inveigles his way into the household, eventually sowing great unhappiness. (Victor is a breathtakingly bad guy—I hope we’ll talk about this.)

These are all interesting characters—so why isn’t the book named after any of them? That would be the usual 19th-century thing. (Jane Eyre, Daniel Deronda, Eline Vere, Anna Karenina,l etc., etc.) Why does it have such an odd title? Who or what does “miaow” refer to, anyway? Well, lots of things. It’s the nickname given by the local wags to the women of the Villaamil household, after their supposedly feline features. I think it’s important, though, that the book isn’t called The Miaows. For the title also extends to Ramón, the paterfamilias—not because of how he looks but of what he believes. MIAOW is an acronym for his mantra that Spain can only be saved by Morality, Income Tax, Additional Import Tariffs, Overhaul of the National Debt, and Work. So already “miaow” references both physiognomy and economy. But there’s more. In addition to being a noun, miaow is also a verb, a sound, an onomatopoeia, and a sarcastic, acidic, or bitchy commentary, as when we call someone out for being catty: Mee-ow! It’s this last meaning I thought of most as I considered the harsh disdain so often expressed by the characters toward each other and the gentle satire of the narrative voice toward all of them.

Once we see that “miaow” is something like a mood or attitude or state of mind, we’re able to recognize how unusually Galdós uses characterization. In my description of the book a minute ago, I made it sound like a family story. But it’s not, quite. The critic Fredric Jameson, who really loved Galdós and thought his unfamiliarity in the English-reading world a real travesty, says that Galdós offers “a deterioration of protagonicity,” an admittedly unlovely phrase that he glosses as “the movement of the putative heroes and heroines to the background, whose foreground is increasingly dominated by minor or secondary characters.” As a Marxist, Jameson attributes this not just to Galdós’s predilection or “genius” but to his position as a person living in late 19th century Spain and its strangely non-modern political landscape following the failed “Glorious Revolution” of 1867 (they deposed the monarchy and then brought it back, sort of). To depict the social reality of his society, Galdós had to “strike[ ] an uneasy compromise between the atomized individualism of more fully bourgeois societies with their nuclear families, and the more archaic traces of the older feudal class and castes.” To me, this explains why Galdós feels like an uncanny version or simulacrum of canonical realists like Balzac or Zola, with whom Galdós shares an interest in recurring characters and the desire to explore an entire society. Miaow reminded me of Père Goriot or La Bête Humaine. But also not. Jameson notes that Galdós’s novels are not organized around families, even extended families, but rather around households, an ambiguous term that includes servants, neighbours, and other families who circulate in and out of the story. (In Miaow, Doña Pura is always hosting friends, acquaintances, people who may or may not respect or like; Ramón is always trying to hide from them.) The household thus includes the Mendizábals, a couple who live downstairs and take pity on the much-neglected Luis; the Cabreras, the sister and brother-in-law of that cad Victor, who want to adopt Luis; as well as a whole series of characters at Don Ramón’s former office, some of whom are, to me at least, hard to keep track of, but to whom the novel devotes so much attention, in their various sympathy to or ridicule of Don Ramón, that it doesn’t make sense to just call them “minor.”

All of which is to say that Miaow, though not especially long (it’s like 300 pages) is very busy. To that end I was struck by a word that appears in the first sentence and reappears near the end. Here’s how the novel begins: “At four o’clock in the afternoon, the kids from the school on Plazuela del Limón erupted out of the classroom, making the very devil of a racket.” 250 pages later, a disconsolate, embittered Don Ramón observes a flood of civil servants clattering out of the workplaces at the tax office on payday: “The stairs were almost overwhelmed by this human torrent, which made a tremendous racket as it flowed on down, the sound of heavy footsteps mingling with all the cheerful, sparkling, payday chatter.”

The repetition of racket reminds us that bureaucrats are just overgrown schoolboys. Here we see Galdós’s satirical side. (And by the way, surely the opening scene of the schoolchildren, who, as they pile into the streets, tease little Luis with the nickname of his aunts and grandmother, miaow, miaow, miaow, refers to the opening of Madame Bovary, where a different set of schoolboys taunt a nice enough if also hapless pupil.) But more importantly the repetition of racket speaks to its modus operandi., maybe what we’d now call its vibe. This book too makes a tremendous racket, in the best possible way, with clever dogs, opera singers, officious bureaucrats, raw army recruits, shopkeepers, and a score of others contributing their two cents. Mee-ow indeed.

Have any of you read this book? Or anything else by Galdós? What do you think?