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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Runaway
by Alice Monro |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Lyrical Alice Munro has published a new
collection of stories titled, Runaway,
that showcases her exceptional talent. Munro’s prose is lyrical, often
sparse, and captures human situations with precision, especially the complicated
lives of women changing over time. Here’s
an excerpt, from the beginning of the story titled, “Soon,” pp. 87-95: Two profiles face each other. One the
profile of a pure white heifer, with a particularly mild and tender expression,
the other that of a green-faced man who is neither young nor old. He seems
to be a minor official, maybe a postman—he wears that sort of cap. His lips
are pale, the whites of his eyes shining. A hand that is probably his offers
up, from the lower margin of the painting, a little tree or an exuberant
branch, fruited with jewels. At
the upper margin of the painting are dark clouds, and underneath them some
small tottery houses and a toy church with its toy cross, perched on the
curved surface of the earth. Within this curve a small man (drawn to a larger
scale, however, than the buildings) walks along purposefully with a scythe on
his shoulder, and a woman, drawn to the same scale, seems to wait for him.
But she is hanging upside down. There are other things as well. For
instance, a girl milking a cow, within the heifer’s cheek. Juliet decided at once to buy this print
for her parents’ Christmas present. “Because it reminds me of them,” she
said to Christa, her friend who had come down with her from Christa laughed. “The green man and the
cow? They’ll be flattered.” Christa never took anything seriously
at first, she had to make some joke about it. Juliet
wasn’t bothered. Three months pregnant with the baby that would turn out to
be Penelope, she was suddenly free of nausea, and for that reason, or some
other, she was subject to fits of euphoria. She thought of food all the time,
and hadn’t even wanted to come into the gift shop, because she had spotted a
lunchroom. She loved everything in the picture,
but particularly the little figures and rickety buildings at the top of it.
The man with the scythe and the woman hanging upside down. She looked for the title. I and the
Village. It made exquisite sense. “Chagall. I like Chagall,” said
Christa. “Picasso was a bastard.” Juliet was so happy with what she had
found that she could hardly pay attention. “You know what he is supposed to have
said? Chagall is for shopgirls,” Christa
told her. “So what’s wrong with shop-girls? Chagall should have said, Picasso is for people with funny faces.” “I mean, it makes me think of their
life,” Juliet said. “I don’t know why, but it does.” She had already told Christa some
things about her parents—how they lived in a curious but not unhappy
isolation, though her father was a popular schoolteacher. Partly they were
cut off by Sara’s heart trouble, but also by their subscribing to magazines
nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network,
which nobody around them listened to. By Sara’s making her own
clothes—sometimes ineptly— from Vogue patterns, instead of Butterick. Even by the way they preserved some impression
of youth instead of thickening and slouching like the parents of Juliet’s
schoolfellows. Juliet had described Sam as looking like her—long neck, a
slight bump to the chin, light-brown floppy hair—and Sara as a frail pale
blonde, a wispy untidy beauty. When Penelope was
thirteen months old, Juliet flew with her to She was disappointed to
get off at this unfamiliar station and not to see reappear, at once, the
trees and sidewalks and houses she remembered—_then, very soon, her own
house, Sam and Sara’s house, spacious but plain, no doubt with its same
blistered and shabby white paint, behind its bountiful soft-maple tree. Sam and Sara, here in
this town where she’d never seen them before, were smiling but anxious,
diminished. Sara gave a curious
little cry, as if something had pecked her. A couple of people on the
platform turned to look. Apparently it was only
excitement. “We’re long and short,
but still we match,” she said. At first Juliet did not
understand what was meant. Then she figured it out—Sara was wearing a black
linen skirt down to her calves and a matching jacket. The jacket’s collar and
cuffs were of a shiny lime-green cloth with black polka dots. A turban of the
same green material covered her hair. She must have made the outfit herself,
or got some dressmaker to make it for her. Its colors were unkind to her
skin, which looked as if fine chalk dust had settled over it. Juliet was wearing a
black minidress. “I was wondering what
you’d think of me, black in the summertime, like I’m all in mourning,” Sara
said. “And here you’re dressed to match. You look so smart,
I’m all in favor of these short dresses.” “And long hair,” said
Sam. “An absolute hippy.” He bent to look into the baby’s face. “Hello,
Penelope.” Sara said, “What a
dolly.” She reached out for
Penelope—though the arms that slid out of her sleeves were sticks too frail
to hold any such burden. And they did not have to, because Penelope, who had
tensed at the first sound of her grandmother’s voice, now yelped and turned
away, and hid her face in Juliet’s neck. Sara laughed. “Am I such
a scarecrow?” Again her voice was” ill controlled, rising to shrill peaks and
falling away, drawing’ stares. This was new—though maybe not entirely. Juliet
had an, idea that people might always have looked her mother’s way when she
laughed or talked, but in the old days it would have been a spurt of
merriment they noticed, something girlish and attractive (though not everybody
would have liked that either, they would have said she was always trying to
get attention). Juliet said, “She’s so
tired.” Sam introduced the young
woman who was standing behind them, keeping her distance as if she was taking
care not to be identified as part of their group. And in fact it had not
occurred to Juliet that she was. “Juliet, this is Irene.
Irene Avery.” Juliet stuck out her hand
as well as she could while holding Penelope and the diaper bag, and when it
became evident that Irene was not going to shake hands—or perhaps did not
notice the intention—she smiled. Irene did not smile back. She stood quite
still but gave the impression of wanting to bolt. “Hello,” said Juliet. Irene said, “Pleased to
meet you,” in a sufficiently audible voice, but without expression. “Irene is our good
fairy,” Sara said, and then Irene’s face did change. She scowled a little,
with sensible embarrassment. She was not as tall as
Juliet—who was tall—but she was broader in the shoulders and hips, with
strong arms and a stubborn chin. She had thick, springy black hair, pulled
back from her face into a stubby ponytail, thick and rather hostile black
eyebrows, and the sort of skin that browns easily. Her eyes were green or
blue, a light surprising color against this skin, and hard to look into,
being deep set. Also because she held her head slightly lowered and twisted
her face to the side. This wariness seemed hardened and deliberate. “She does one heck of a
lot of work for a fairy,” Sam said, with his large strategic grin. “I’ll tell
the world she does.” And now of course Juliet
recalled the mention in letters of some woman who had come in to help,
because of Sara’s strength having gone so drastically downhill. But she had
thought of somebody much older. Irene was surely no older than she was
herself. The car was the same “The old gray mare,” said
Sara, almost out of breath after the short walk from the railway platform. “She hasn’t given up,”
said Juliet. She spoke admiringly, as seemed to be expected. She had
forgotten that this was what they called the car, though it was the name she
had thought up herself. “Oh, she never gives up,” said Sara,
once she was settled with Irene’s help in the backseat. “And we’d never give
up on her.” Juliet got into the front seat,
juggling Penelope, who was beginning again to whimper. The heat inside the
car was shocking, even though it had been parked with the windows down in
the scanty shade of the station poplars. “Actually I’m considering—,” said Sam
as he backed out, “I’m considering turning her in for a truck.” “He doesn’t mean it,” shrieked Sara. “For the business,” Sam continued.
“It’d be a lot handier. And you’d get a certain amount of advertising every
time you drove down the street, just from the name on the door.” “He’s teasing,” Sara said. “How am I
going to ride around in a
vehicle that says Fresh Vegetables? Am I supposed to be the squash or
the cabbage?” “Better pipe down, Missus,” Sam said,
“or you won’t have any breath left when we reach home.” After nearly thirty years of teaching
in the public schools around the county—ten years in the last school—Sam had
suddenly quit and decided to get into the business of selling vegetables,
full-time. He had always cultivated a big vegetable garden, and raspberry
canes, in the extra lot beside their house, and they had sold their surplus
produce to a few people around town. But now, apparently, this was to change
into his way of making a living, selling to grocery stores and perhaps
eventually putting up a market stall at the front gate. “You’re serious about all this?” said
Juliet quietly. “Darn right I am.” “You’re not going to miss teaching?” “Not on your Nelly-O. I was fed up. I
was fed up to the eyeballs.” It was true that after
all those years, he had never been offered, in any school, the job of
principal. She supposed that was what he was fed up with. He was a remarkable
teacher, the one whose antics and energy everyone would remember, his Grade
Six unlike any other year in his pupils’ lives. Yet he had been passed over,
time and again, and probably for that very reason. His methods could be seen
to undercut authority. So you could imagine Authority saying that he was not
the sort of man to be in charge, he’d do less harm where he was. He liked outdoor work, he
was good at talking to people, he would probably do
well, selling vegetables. But Sara would hate it. Juliet did not like it
either. If there was a side to be on, however, she would have to choose his.
She was not going to define herself as a snob. And the truth was that
she saw herself—she saw herself and Sam and Sara, but particularly herself
and Sam—as superior in their own way to everybody around them. So what should
his peddling vegetables matter? Sam spoke now in a
quieter, conspiratorial voice. “What’s her name?” He meant the baby’s. “Penelope. We’re never
going to call her Penny. Penelope.” “No, I mean—I mean her
last name.” “Oh. Well, it’s
Henderson-Porteous I guess. Or Porteous-Henderson.
But maybe that’s too much of a mouthful, when she’s already called Penelope?
We knew that but we wanted Penelope. We’ll have to settle it somehow.” “So. He’s given her his
name,” Sam said. “Well, that’s something. I mean, that’s good.” Juliet was surprised for
a moment, then not. “Of course he has,” she
said. Pretending to be mystified and amused. “She’s his.” “Oh yes. Yes. But given the
circumstances.” “I forget about the circumstances,” she
said. “If you mean the fact that we’re not married, it’s hardly anything to
take into account. Where we live, the people we know, it is not a thing anybody thinks about.” “Suppose not,” said Sam. “Was he
married to the first one?” Juliet had told them about Eric’s wife, whom he
had cared for during the eight years that she had lived after her car
accident. “Ann? Yes. Well, I don’t really know.
But yes. I think so. Yes.” Sara called into the front seat,
“Wouldn’t it be nice to stop for ice cream. “We’ve got ice cream in the fridge at
home,” Sam called back. And added quietly, shockingly, to Juliet, “Take her
into anyplace for a treat, and she’ll put on a show.” The windows were still down, the warm wind blew through the car. It was full summer—a season
which never arrived, as far as Juliet could see, on the west coast. The
hardwood trees were humped over the far edge of the fields, making blue-black caves of shade, and the crops and the
meadows in front of them, under the hard sunlight, were gold and green.
Vigorous young wheat and barley and corn and beans—fairly blistering your
eyes. Sara said, “What’s this conference in
aid of? In the front seat? We can’t hear back here for the wind.” Sam said, “Nothing interesting. Just
asking Juliet if her fellow’s still doing the fishing.” Eric made his living prawn fishing, and
had done so for a long time. Once he had been a medical student. That had
come to an end because he had performed an abortion, on a friend (not a
girlfriend). All had gone well, but somehow the story got out. This was
something Juliet had thought of revealing to her broad-minded parents. She
had wanted, perhaps, to establish him as an educated man, not just a fisherman.
But why should that matter, especially now that Sam was a vegetable man?
Also, their broad-mindedness was possibly not so
reliable as she had thought. The theme of time pervades the stories
in Runaway.
Munro’s structure and dialogue provide pleasure for all readers. The quality
of her writing can be savored in each of these stories. Steve Hopkins,
February 25, 2005 |
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ă 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Runaway.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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