Alice Munro

After Philip Roth finally wins the Nobel for literature (hopefully this week!), I am going to be pulling for the Canadian writer Alice Munro. Take this exchange from her story "Apples and Oranges" out of her collection Friend of My Youth.

Murray fell in love with her then, if he was not in love already. Here is a noble girl, he thought. A bold black-and-white lily out of the Swamp Irish--Lorna Doone with a rougher tongue and a stronger spine. Mother won't like her, he thought. (About that he was entirely right.) He was happier than he'd been at any time since he lost his faith. (That was an unsatisfactory way of putting it. It was more as if he'd come into a closed-off room or opened a drawer and found that his faith had dried up, turned to a mound of dust in the corner.)

He always said that he made up his mind at once to get Barbara, but he used no tactics beyond an open display of worship. A capacity for worship had been noticeable in him all through his school days, along with his good nature and a tendency to befriend underdogs. But he was sturdy enough--he had enough advantages of his own--that it hadn't got him any serious squelching. Minor squelches he was able to sustain.

Barbara refused to ride on a float as the Downtown Merchants' contestant for the Queen of the Dominion Day Parade.

"I absolutely agree with you," said Murray. "Beauty contests are degrading."

"It's the paper flowers," said Barbara. "They make me sneeze."

That's just some great writing. Munro is so good at exploring the kind of delusions that we live under and the ways we try too hard at the things we do. She also, and I can't really describe this well, has a way of putting a little twist at the end of stories, a fact or seemingly slight plot development, that completely changes the way you think about the story and the characters. I understand that Munro is read a lot in Canada, but not much in the US. Hopefully that changes soon.