Too Much Happiness

Starred review from August 17, 2009
Munro's latest collection is satisfyingly true to form and demonstrates why she continues to garner laurels (such as this year's Man Booker International Prize). Through carefully crafted situations, Munro breathes arresting life into her characters, their relationships and their traumas. In “Wenlock Edge,” a college student in London, Ontario, acquires a curious roommate in Nina, who tricks the narrator into a revealing dinner date with Nina's paramour, the significantly older Mr. Purvis. “Child's Play,” a dark story about children's capacity for cruelty and the longevity of their secrets, introduces two summer camp friends, Marlene and Charlene, who form a pact against the slightly disturbing Verna, whose family used to share Marlene's duplex. The title, and final, story, the collection's longest and most ambitious, takes the reader to 19th-century Europe to meet Sophia Kovalevski, a talented mathematician and novelist who grapples with the politics of the age and the consequences of success. While this story lacks some of the effortlessness found in Munro's finest work, the collection delivers what she's renowned for: poignancy, flesh and blood characters and a style nothing short of elegant.

November 1, 2009
Every story collection from Canada's Alice Munro receives such critical plaudits that it's tempting for reviewers to recycle superlatives and readers to take her for granted. But there is no such thing as just"another" Munro release. Each time, she extends her work in a manner that redefines it.

Her latest doesn't represent as radical a repositioning as its predecessor, The View from Castle Rock (2006), which Munro introduced as a story cycle different than anything she had published before, based on generations of her family's historical record as reflected in journals, letters and the writer's research. But most of the stories in Too Much Happiness—and most of them are shorter than usual for Munro—also concern the relationship between life and storytelling, how the construction of narrative reveals deeper truths or uncomfortable lies.

In one of the stories, simply titled"Fiction," the protagonist finds her own life recast in the stories of her divorced husband's stepdaughter."How Are We to Live is the book's title," she relates."A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is hanging on the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside."

Ha! No modern writer this side of Raymond Carver has opened that gate wider for the story's literary regard, though Munro's fiction has more of a novelistic scope and scale than the elliptical, tightly focused work of Carver (and so many other short-story writers). In less than 30 pages,"Fiction" combines the chronological expanse of a novel with an artful compression that merges the events as remembered by the protagonist and the fiction it has inspired.

Even more powerfully,"Child's Play" concerns the stories we concoct in order to live with ourselves. The question posed to the girlhood protagonist—"How can you blame a person for the way she was born?"—carries greater resonance as she achieves the maturity of the narrative perspective, climaxing in a stunning confessional about childhood complicity and guilt.

Title aside, there is far more death than happiness in these stories—the body count, though not the violence, rivals a Cormac McCarthy novel. Yet the title story, the longest and last, arrives at an epiphany that combines ecstasy and mortality in a manner that puts all that has come before—in this volume and throughout Munro's career—in blindingly fresh light.

As Munro explains in her acknowledgements, it's a story based on the final days of Sophia Kovalevski, a brilliant Russian mathematician who also wrote fiction that enraged her father."Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?" he sputters after a magazine edited by Dostoyevsky publishes her. Here, Munro herself reads like a Russian master. It's hard to imagine that anyone could write stories richer than these. Until the next Munro collection.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2009
In this riveting new collection, Munro probes loss, loneliness, regret, separation, and death in her typically brilliant fashion, portraying ordinary men and women seeking to find the clues that will help them toward wholeness or, at the very least, an acceptance of a broken life. In "Deep-Holes," a defeated mother who has finally tracked down a prodigal son realizes that in the end we're "marooned on islands of our own choosing, clear sighted, content." In "Dimensions," a Medea story in reverse, Doree tries to move beyond the loss of her children by visiting their father and murderer, Lloyd, in a mental hospital. The visit brings her no peace, but a jarring event on her bus trip back home brings an unexpected resolution. In the title story, based on the life of Russian mathematician and novelist Sophie Kovalevsky, the widow Sophie comes to realize the precarious and fleeting nature of happiness even as she embraces the fullness of life. VERDICT Much like her fellow Canadian writer David Adams Richards, Munro captures the intimate lives of her characters as they seek solace amid disruption. Fans of the prize-winning Munro will eagerly devour her latest. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 7/09.]Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2009
There arent enough stories in Munros latest collection. Yes, in actual number (11), they certainly add up to a good-sized collection. But Munro is in her stridewhen no one can approach her short-story geniusa condition in which she fully maintains herself in this, her eleventh collection. Awestruck readers will realize about three-quarters of the way through this book that they wont be satiated. More stories, please. The stories indeed are outstanding. Munros famous even-handed yet astonishingly acute pyschological depictions of ordinary mothers, fathers, lovers, and neighborsprimarily natives of her native rural and small-town Ontariowhich she relays to her readers in her trademark placid but sonorous prose style, are exemplary of her surpreme mastery of the form. These fictions are longish for short stories, as is Munros practice. Dimensions leads off the collection and couldnt be a stronger announcement of the brilliance to come. With the expected Munro time shifts, this tale of infanticide illuminates the understandable root of such a horrible deed. In Face, Munro succeeds beautifully with a male point of view; an intriguing ending caps Wenlock Edge, about a coeds mothers bachelor cousin. The last one in the collection, the title story, is reminiscent of Cynthia Ozick in setting and theme but surpasses Ozick in fluency and comprehensibility; it is a poignant fictionalization of the professional and personal life of an actual late-nineteenth-century, early-twentieth-century female mathematician.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)