The View from Castle Rock

September 25, 2006


Reviewed by Sigrid Nunez

Ten collections of stories and one novel have made Alice Munro one of the most praised fiction writers of our time. In The View from Castle Rock
her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behavior and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling.
Munro, in a foreword, tells how, a decade ago, she began looking into her family history, going all the way back to 18th-century Scotland. This material eventually became the stories presented here in part 1, "No Advantages." Munro also worked on "a special set of stories," none of which she included in previous collections, because they were "rather more personal than the other stories I had written." They now appear here in part 2, "Home." With both parts, Munro says, she has had a free hand with invention.
Munro has used personal material in her fiction before, but at 75, she has given us something much closer to autobiography. Much of the book concerns people who have died, and places and ways of life that no longer exist or have been completely transformed, and though Munro is temperamentally unsentimental the mood is often elegiac.
One difficulty that can arise with this kind of hybrid work is that the reader is likely to be distracted by the itch to know whether an event really occurred, or how much has been made up or embellished. In the title story, the reader is explicitly told that almost everything has been invented, and this enthralling multilayered narrative about an early 19th-century Scottish family's voyage to the New World is the high point of the collection. On the other hand, "What Do You Want to Know For?" at the heart of which is an account of a cancer scare Munro experienced, reads like pure memoir and seems not only thin by comparison but insufficiently imagined as a short story.
Perhaps none of the stories here is quite up to the mastery of earlier Munro stories such as "The Beggar Maid" or "The Albanian Virgin." But getting this close to the core of the girl who would become the master is a privilege and a pleasure not to be missed. And reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro's stories—whatever the proportions of fiction and fact—always bring us the truth. (Nov.)

Sigrid Nunez's most recent novel, The Last of Her Kind, will be published in paperback by Picador in December.

Starred review from October 1, 2006
With this new collection, Munro ("Runaway") more than lives up to her reputation as a master of short fiction. In 12 exquisitely constructed tales, she draws on family lore and letters to interpret the history of her Laidlaw relatives, a tough bunch from Scotlands Ettrick Valley that eventually emigrated to the New World. The title story, set in 1818, details a transatlantic voyage undertaken by six Laidlaws for whom ocean sailing is a totally new experience. Their struggles in adjusting to shipboard life anticipate challenges ahead in America as their fears and hopes culminate in the arrival of baby Isabel, all her life to be known as one born at sea. In No Advantages, a modern-day narrators visit to Ettrick reveals what the family gained (and perhaps lost) by leaving the legend-haunted valley, while other stories explore how the harsh realities of wilderness pioneering affect several generations. All the narratives exhibit Munros keen eye for realistic details and her ability to illuminate the depths of seemingly mundane lives and relationships. Highly recommended."Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2006
Munro is universally accepted as one of the outstanding writers of the short story in English, but her new book is both frustrating and exhilarating. "The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean," remarks a character in one of the stories in the first--the frustrating--grouping of stories; that statement could stand as the theme underlying the entire book. Munro has always relied on characters' personal and familial histories as chief material from which her beautifully articulated stories are fashioned, and this traditional type of Munro story populates the second half of this collection. There, Munro traditionalists will find much to feast on. It is the first half of the book that is problematic. She introduces these stories as fiction; topically, they are about her Scottish ancestors coming to Canada and the roots and branches established therein. Writing style--yes, predictably limpid and lovely. And they are as psychologically astute as one would expect from a very "smart" writer. But they taste like autobiographical essays; her intrusions into the prose not as narrator but as actual author prove distracting and erode the veil of suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, only purists will howl over the issue of authorial intrusion, and the vast number of fiction readers will be completely absorbed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)