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By John Delacourt

May 15, 2024

“There may be,” the writer intoned in a soft Cumbrian accent, “only one or two details of the scene in a paragraph: the clock on the wall, the bowl of freshly cut flowers. But trust me, she has every detail of the scene in her head, like a painting or a still from a film, before she puts a word down. Alice knows.”

It was the early aughts, during a summer course at the Humber School for Writers. The instructor was John Metcalf, who had worked closely with, and edited the luminous stories of, Alice Munro over the years, apart from writing some impressive – and richly entertaining – fiction of his own. This student writer, seated uncharacteristically close to the front of the room, trying not to look too enthused, could not quite contain his sense of affirmation in what he was hearing from Metcalf.

I cast furtive glances at the other students in my row: the guy with the perfectly razored goatee and soul patch, the woman with the boutique on Queen Street who freelanced for Now Magazine, and they looked as if they were already deliberating on a course refund while they stifled the urge to yawn. I could sense the wheels turning: Alice Munro? Really? The darling of the luvvies with flowing scarves? Munro, the demure little lady from Huron County with, it seemed, at least one volume of her short stories displayed prominently in every small-town library, every hospital auxiliary charity book sale, and usually, if you foraged long enough in the dentist’s office, in an old New Yorker buried under the Auto Traders and Readers Digests. How conventional. I mean, here we all were, waiting for tips on how to catch the attention of an agent, and this eccentric old guy had chosen her as a paragon of the craft of fiction writing?

For that hour though, everything I only dimly intuited about the mysteries of writing great fiction was finally coming to light. If there were any doubts in my mind about what I first experienced reading Alice Munro when I was barely a teenager, they were evaporating by the minute, as I was revisiting a nightmare from high school: exposed as a complete nerd, cast out from the temple of cool.

I swear the above is only lightly fictionalized (due mostly to my dismal reporting skills and recall of dialogue – there’s a better reporter in my family). Though it might be hard to believe now, especially in light of all the tributes to Munro’s art that have been written over the last twenty-four hours, but there was a time in this country when ambitious young writers didn’t want to sound too reverent about say, yet another collection of Munro’s nominated for a Giller or a Booker. Much of the criticism of her work was similar to the American literary critic Christian Lorentzen’s takedown from 2013 in the London Review of Books, in which, at his most charitable, he damns Munro with faint praise for her “perfectly polished prose” which “isn’t interesting.”

Here’s a little of that drive-by shooting, prompted by Lorentzen reading ten of her story collections:

“I became sad, like her characters, and like them I got sadder. I grew attuned to the ways life is shabby or grubby, words that come up all the time in her stories … I saw everyone heading towards cancer, or a case of dementia that would rob them of the memories of the little adulteries they’d probably committed and must have spent their whole lives thinking about.”

If you weren’t left in awe of such artistry, you weren’t really paying attention. Alice knew – she always knew – what she was doing.

It was common to hear similar takes on Munro’s work at Humber over that summer. Lorentzen’s description of Munro as an “epiphany monger” who wrote stories as if no modishly postmodern work had ever crossed her desk to peruse, was appropriate critical positioning for young (usually male) writers stoked on the high-concept tomes churning out of the new MFA industrial complex in the US and the UK, work that the critic James Wood classified succinctly and devastatingly with his term “hysterical realism.”

What the aspirants and acolytes of lit-bro fiction could not quite acknowledge was that — without any of the flash and pyrotechnics of the metafictional, the self-referential, the polyphonic or the rigorously, ‘playfully’ footnoted — Alice Munro, read closely (and repeatedly), was capable of a subdued elegant innovation with the short story form, and she was constantly venturing into ways of telling that interested her, vigilantly reinvigorating the poetics of her craft.

As Metcalf just casually mentioned for those among my class whom he hadn’t lost yet that afternoon, Munro could manage in fifty pages what the most formalistically adventurous novels could only attempt over three hundred … and she worked this magic for maximum emotional impact. Her realism never needed to stray into the hysterical; what author Penelope Fitzgerald said of George Eliot, that she rendered “low-key emotions minutely traced,” Munro easily mastered in her earliest stories, but she could then telescope and intensify those emotionally resonant moments over the course of a character’s lifetime in just twenty or thirty pages, turning them gemlike, more-often-than-not to devastating effect.

If you weren’t left in awe of such artistry, you weren’t really paying attention. Alice knew – she always knew – what she was doing. Her restless, evolving aesthetic betrayed a far more sophisticated understanding of form than any “epiphany monger” ever would.

As Heather O’Neill has so astutely noted, beyond formal innovation, Munro’s deep understanding of character allowed her to depict, time and again, the slow, devastating insurrection of identity that desire could wreak on someone … anyone … all of us. And as Sheila Heti has so beautifully recounted, Alice also knew how a writer should be in the world. She knew it all.

And she left it for us, in those stories that will outlast her and continue to define us. She wrote from the depths of memory, like all great writers do, but I believe she slyly, elegantly, transcended the emotional geography she knew so well to chart all of our stubbornly human, fragile futures too. What a gift to this country, and humanity, she was.

Policy Contributing Writer and Counsel Public Affairs VP  John Delacourt has published five novels: Ocular Proof, Black Irises, Butterfly, Provenance and, most recently, Black State.