Runaway by Alice Munro

Source of book: I own this.

 

I first read Alice Munro six years ago, when I borrowed The Moons of Jupiter from the library. I had been intending to get back to her, but, so many books to read, and…

 

Well, anyway, I now own a couple of collections of her stories, and decided to read Runaway next. 

 

This collection of eight longish short stories (around 30 to 40 pages each) has, in my view, the theme of “it might have been” running through all eight. Every story is about some sort of desire and discontent (as a frequent commenter on my blog put it) that goes unfulfilled. Unlike the previous collection I read, these are all stories that span time - in some cases a lifetime - rather than focusing on a single incident. The watershed event in some of the stories comes in youth, with the implications only clear decades later. In others, the event occurs later, but is in some way connected to an earlier event or decision. None of the stories ends “well,” so to speak, but, as in Munro stories generally, it is clear that something has been changed in the protagonist. 

 

The titular story is about a woman who attempts to leave an abusive marriage. Although, to be honest, the marriage is...complicated, as much as anything. At the time of the crisis, a rainy summer has wreaked havoc on their finances, stress abounds, and nobody is behaving particularly well. Still, the man is not the sort I would want around. The fallout from the attempt to leave, the change of mind, and the destruction that follows is particularly harrowing. It is the most traumatic story in the book.

 

The next three stories, “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” are all related, following Juliet’s life from her first job out of college through her old age. Juliet studied ancient languages, which wasn’t exactly led to scintillating prospects. Particularly at the time in which the story is set - some 40 or 50 years before the present.  

 

Her professors were delighted with her - they were grateful these days for anybody who took up ancient languages, and particularly for someone so gifted - but they were worried as well. The problem was that she was a girl. If she got married - which might happen, as she was not bad-looking for a scholarship girl, she was not bad-looking at all - she would waste all her hard work and theirs, and if she did not get married she would probably become bleak and isolated, losing out on promotions to men (who needed them more, as they had to support families). And she would not be able to defend the oddity of her choice of Classics, to accept what people would see as its irrelevance, or dreariness, to slough that off the way a man could. Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around. 

 

Unfortunately, a lot of that is still true these days, alas. Juliet makes an even odder choice, though, by falling in love with an older married man with a dying wife. They hook up after he is widowed, have a child, but never marry, living together on an island on the Pacific coast. 

 

In the second story, Juliet takes a trip to visit her parents in central Canada, and show them her child. The visit is...pretty awkward. (Honestly, nobody writes about awkward family visits as well as Munro.) Her mother is dying of her chronic illness from a childhood infection, her dad might be sleeping with the hired help, and both of them have changed careers to an organic farm food sort of hippie thing. Juliet discovers she really doesn’t know either of them anymore. 

 

In the final story, we fast forward a lot. Juliet and her baby-daddy have argued, then he died in a boating accident. But then, their daughter has possibly joined a religious cult. Except she has left, and just….disappeared. And this silence goes on for what we have to assume is the rest of Juliet’s life, as she becomes more and more isolated. Each of the stories is a case of “might have been.” 

 

Interesting note about this group of stories: A print of Marc Chagall’s painting, I and the Village plays a part. 

 “Passion” is about a very brief affair. Grace meets a family while doing seasonal work in a small vacation town. Eventually, she becomes practically a part of it, and expects to marry the younger son. Until a freak injury and the surrounding circumstances lead her on a wild drive and sex with the older, unhappily married son. It is a good bit of writing, particularly since, like several of the stories, it starts with the present before flashing back decades to what happened back in the day, and slowly reveals the details that are alluded to at the beginning. 

 

One particularly great line in this story comes after Grace sees the older version of Father of the Bride with her beau, and finds herself loathing it, and particularly loathing Elizabeth Taylor. And not because Grace grew up poor either.  

 

She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn’t altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn’t shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That is what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she’d be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever. 

 

That is literally the past that the cultic groups my wife and I grew up in wanted to return to. The expectation that a woman should be a certain way to get a guy still persists (although it isn’t accurate for my generation, let alone my kids’ generation.) Particularly the bit about becoming a mother and making that one’s sole life. 

 

“Trespasses” centers around a dark secret. Teenaged Lauren discovers a small box in her parents’ effects while doing some cleaning, and freaks her father out. It turns out that it contains the ashes of her older sibling, who was killed when her mom lost control of a car and crashed. But that turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg. New to the small town she lives in, Lauren has difficulty making friends, but is befriended by an older woman who clerks at the hotel. But why? And what really happened all those years ago? 

 

Possibly my favorite, although as achingly sad as the others, is “Tricks.” Robin, a young woman out of step with her time and place, wishes to see more than the small town. But she is largely anchored by her asthmatic sister Joann, now that their parents are dead. But she likes to take the train to the next town and see a Shakespeare play. Everyone she knows thinks that she can’t possibly actually like Shakespeare. But she does.

 

Then, one day, she accidentally loses her purse, with her money and her return ticket. She is befriended by a Montenegrin immigrant, who feeds her, then sends her on her way after a bit of passion and the extraction of a promise that she come see him next summer when she comes to see the next play. She does, but he is bizarrely changed: uncommunicative and surly. Devastated, she breaks down, and never returns. Forty years later, she makes the discovery (similar to the plot in Comedy of Errors, the play the year everything went wrong) that explains everything. And unfortunately exposes the chance at love that she missed by rotten chance. 

 

The final story is “Powers,” about a clairvoyant woman who is “discovered” by a somewhat unscrupulous man, the cousin of the narrator’s fiancé. As the story unravels a lifetime later, the depth of deception and duplicity of several characters comes to light, and one is tempted to put the book down afterward and say, “Oh god.” It’s a pretty devastating ending.  

 

Again, I was struck by Munro’s remarkable ability to make the most out of plots involving ordinary people that have very little happen to them. True, the plots in this book are a bit more “something happens” than in The Moons of Jupiter. But still, they are notable for how little actually happens. Opportunities are missed, rather than grabbed. Connections that should happen don’t. Secrets, rather than either staying hidden or being revealed intentionally are exposed by happenstance, or misunderstanding. Opportunities that are seized fail to lead anywhere other than tragedy, stagnation, or just ennui. But that is part of Munro’s gift: seeing the stories that are internal, that are hidden, that play out in the lives and psyches of ordinary, usually middle-aged women. He skill is in the way she makes one care about these ordinary lives and small-scale yet all-encompassing dramas. Likewise, the small towns and rural hamlets of Canada are brought to life. The writing is truly superb, and the psychological depth satisfying. I have enjoyed every Munro story I have read so far.