Canadians, like the English, are known for our tendency to apologise. The difference is, we actually mean it. Our modesty is not false. Our inferiority complex is not a polite, self-deprecating joke. We really do feel inferior. And we really are sorry. Sorry for taking up so much space for so few people. Sorry for being so dull and functional compared with our glitzy neighbour to the south. Sorry about Celine Dion. And above all, sorry for failing to produce much of anything great apart from Niagara Falls and the Rockies, which we can’t take credit for anyway.
So when Alice Munro, our most quietly adored author, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last week, the entire nation gave a collective whoop and then glanced furtively over our shoulder as if to say, ‘Are you sure there hasn’t been some mistake?’
Munro is the most unlikely of Nobel laureates. Her body of work consists almost exclusively of short stories set in small towns about the lives of middle-class Canadians. Her prose style is restrained. Her subject matter grounded in the real. Divorce is a big theme. As is adultery. Tall poppy syndrome, as evidenced in the title story of her 1978 collection Who Do You Think You Are?, is another persistent obsession. Not surprisingly, Munro has mixed feelings about her own literary fame, which is why she rarely gives interviews or travels from her home in Clinton, Ontario. This is not to say she’s a reclusive bumpkin — the literary love child of Thomas Pynchon and Jill Archer — as some media outlets have portrayed her. Just that she is uncomfortable with notions of greatness, especially her own.
As she told Maclean’s magazine in the 1990s, ‘In my family, as in Canada, there was a double message.
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