A confession: when I first started reading the famous Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, I persisted. She has such a reputation. I was young and intent on appreciating what is appreciated. At first, I didn't always find I appreciated. Munro is plain-spoken and one of the least sentimental writers imaginable. I bend toward fireworks and melodrama. With time, I grew tired of some of my early enthusiasms, and this allowed me to see the wonderful way Munro shaped stories. I admired her honest realism. I grew to like the way she often genuinely surprised. However, I didn't really appreciate them till they began talking to me. Sometimes they laughed at me. Sometimes they chastised. Many began to fascinate me: I found with time that they were increasingly reflecting my life.
Her latest story, "Deep-holes" (The New Yorker June 30th, 2008 New Yorker) is no exception. As recently pointed out by Sarah Statz Cords in her wonderful book blog The Citizen Reader, sometimes one read things one "wants to keep to oneself...books [that] have to do with personal topics that, well, are just too personal." "Deep-holes" is such a story.
It is about a son who grows radically and, on the surface, mysteriously estranged from his family. Although a bit of a loner, the boy, Kent, is basically ordinary when he goes off to college one day, eager to pursue a career and science. Then, suddenly, although sort of a snobby loner, he decides to temporarily drop out to work at Canadian Tire and hang out with the guys for a couple months. However, he then just literally disappears altogether. He eventually sends a cryptic letter home, full of cliche-ridden bits of spiritualism and self-help cant. He declares that he can't live like his parents and preaches to them:
...we are given a chance to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself
may seem over-blown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pride fullness--
Munro humorously stops the parents' reading of the letter here. The father figures he's deprived of sex and high on drugs. The mother wonders if she didn't plant the seed for his self-isolation. She remembers when her son was
bed-ridden, recuperating from a terrible injury, and she and her son became infatuated with the idea and study of small, desolate islands. Desert islands are her preoccupation, ostensibly tokening a state of mind that perhaps distanced the sone as a child? In reality, they probably speak to her sometime desire to escape her rather vulnerable and helpless love of her family. Whatever the case, guilty and still loving him, she remains open to her son and when he returs in self-grandizing, prodigal-son fashion, she agrees to met him.
To her hurt. They unite later. The son is still blazing a bizarre new-age style path, equal parts self-abnegation and fully living in the present. On the surface, one might say he is striving for some type of ethical or spiritual perfectionism. However, this quest seems to originate and end in a self-loathing misanthropy, a childish cry for attention that seems always on the verge of a tantrum. The son seeks to be holier-than-thou because he hates thou so very, very much.
Munro seems to write often if not sympathetically about religion. Her perceptions are always acute, as here where she sees in religion a misanthropy that often tries to hide itself in a self-abnegating asceticism. The latter is supposed to be a pathway to God; Munro suggests it is often pursued by those seeking to flee themselves and their humanity.
"Deep-holes" is a wonderfully shaped mystery story, shaped like a bar-bell. The mystery is what might have happened to cause an ordinary boy to fall off the ordinary. Munro's story is beautifully structured. It opens with a carefully detailed scene and ends with one. The scenes take place in the course of afternoons, in what might be thought of as fictional real-time. Between these two scenes, Munro telescopes a good number of years in a relatively sparse number of paragraphs. This telescoped section of story unfolds like time-lapse photography, and while it is full of details essential to plot and some to explaining the meandering of that plot, In this section, all sorts of things come to the fore and lurk in the background, that might account for the son's state at the end of the story, yet it is ultimately the two scenes that book-end this long sequence which Munro sees as essential to each other. A relatively brief moment, an event, disproportionately and indelibly stamps a future.
Aided by her story's form, Munro gives the opening sequence acquires a seminal force. It is an ordinary story. The family went out on a picnic. They picnic amid some dangerous rock formations. Kent, a nine year old, disobeys, goes off to pee, falls in a hole and badly injures himself. Despite the tragic accident, he ultimately recovers, and what strikes one on the first reading is the ordinariness of the event and the family. It is only after encountering the closing counterpart do we see the force of the event, the bizarre strands that composed it.
Somewhere along the way, I thought I had read or heard that Munro was retiring with her last collection, The View from Castle Rock. However, a stream of short stories continues to appear in The New Yorker. I read them all. Back when I read her based on her reputation and struggled with them. I wasn't sure I like them. Now, I read her for the insight and find I struggle with them and am still unsure if I 'like' them. I would never miss one. I'm vain and never pass a mirror without looking in it.
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