Philip Hensher

Moments of clarity

Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro

issue 22 August 2009

By now, Alice Munro has established a territory as her own so completely, you wonder that the Canadian Tourist Board doesn’t run bus tours there.

Perhaps they do, even though it presents an appearance more characteristic than inviting. To think of her world is to think of lonely houses at the edge of bleak, small towns; of unsatisfied backrooms looking over muddy fields; of suburbs, making do; of institutions imposed on half-made landscapes, and human disappointment reflected in the world about her characters.

It is classic short-story territory, and over the years Munro has carved a substantial reputation without venturing very far from what she does best; the classic short story of disappointment and epiphany, in the landscape she knows and understands. She now says she has written only one novel, as long ago as 1971, but one exercise in interlinking stories in a volume, The Beggar Maid, convinced the Booker judges in 1980 that here was a new sort of novel.

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