Too Much Happiness

Too Much Happiness
By Alice Munro
Chatto & Windus £17.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14.39

Alice Munro’s latest book, intriguingly titled Too Much Happiness, is her 11th collection of short stories. The Canadian writer has earned high praise and prizes, including this year’s Man Booker International, despite a common perception that short fiction is somehow less worthwhile than the novel. Indeed, Munro’s most stalwart fans, among them AS Byatt and Margaret Atwood, have compared her with masters such as Chekhov and Flaubert.

Almost all of the 10 stories in this new collection are set, like the bulk of her work, in small-town and rural Ontario, where Munro has lived most of her life.

Women largely take the leading roles, negotiating life in all its messy complexity and strangeness. In certain cases, as in the opening story, “Dimensions”, there is a tragedy to be borne. Doree’s three children have been murdered by her deranged husband, Lloyd, yet still she feels compelled to visit him in prison. Doree’s oscillation between her well-intentioned therapist and her husband, who claims a psychic link with their dead children, is traced with typically nuanced precision. The story ends with an unexpected means to escape Lloyd’s malign influence.

It’s a pattern repeated in several other stories. The lives of Munro’s protagonists pivot on a single moment, the consequences of which slowly ferment over a lifetime. In “Child’s Play”, Munro shows her uncanny ability to nail a character and a relationship in just one sentence. “My mother had a habit of hanging on to – even treasuring – the foibles of my distant infantile state.” The elderly narrator, Marlene, has darker memories of childhood, in particular her murder of a retarded girl. This crime was perpetrated with a previously close girlfriend, who is now seeking solace in a Catholic confession. Marlene’s refusal to follow suit – “What’s done is done. Flock of angels, tears of blood, notwithstanding” – suggests a more complicated kind of death may have occurred all those years ago.

Munro is adept at exploring subtle perspectives. In “Face”, a man born with a facial birthmark tells us of his relatively happy, unremarkable life. It’s his father and a cruel childhood friend who bear the brunt of his disfigurement. The ending of this story is extraordinary – the narrator experiences an epiphany in which a dream, a poem and his memories are all mingled, fashioning a link on some primal level with his former tormentor.

Munro’s mysteries are all the more effective for emerging from such ordinary settings. The language is plain, as is her tone: never sentimental or judgmental, but careful and precise. This understatement, even restraint, heightens her characters’ turbulent emotions. In “Free Radicals”, a middle-aged woman grieves for her recently deceased partner. “One morning after sitting for a while she decided that it was a very hot day. She should get up and turn on the fans.” It’s hard to imagine a more straightforward yet accurate evocation of grief’s glazed displacement.

Munro adroitly peels away her characters’ layers, but they retain a core of mystery. At some level they are unknowable, unfathomable. In “Wood”, an accident seems to jolt a man’s wife out of her long-term depression. But there was “some loss fogging up this gain. Some loss he’d be ashamed to admit to, if he had the energy.”

Perhaps comparisons with Chekhov et al are a trifle overstated, but there’s still a great deal to relish and wonder at here. Too Much Happiness certainly does nothing to suggest any waning of powers as Munro closes in on her ninth decade.

Kieron Corless is co-author of ‘Cannes: Inside the World’s Premier Film Festival’ (Faber)