Too Much Happiness

In her trademark prose, stripped of embellishment and all the more affecting for being so, Munro’s latest stories tackle characteristically dark subjects. Here are reminiscences of significant childhood events, adolescent misdeeds and incomprehensible parental behaviour; here too are meditations on the ageing process and death (‘I grew up, and old’). Many of the women are thin, somehow withered by experience: ‘she knows that the proper word for all parts of her now might be scrawny’; ‘she lost also her rounded, jolly figure, becoming thin and shapeless.’

Men – even the married ones – tend to be introspective loners, distant, unknowable, strange. Or dead. In several stories, practical husbands restore furniture, chop wood, renovate weekend cottages or make furniture, while their wives do other jobs or no jobs, content to sit around (‘that was one reason Rich said she was the right woman for him, she could sit and read and let him alone’). Such retreats from the hubbub of modern life do little, however, to prevent adultery, unhappiness and death from encroaching on their lives.

Set almost entirely in her native Canada, the stories in Too Much Happiness are as powerful and moving as anything Alice Munro has written in her long career. Dive in.