What We Forgive Ourselves

Title: Dear Life
Author: Alice Munro
Host: Shirley at Liz's

From the publisher: "In story after story....Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancee, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer." In addition, "four autobiographical tales offer an unprecedented glimpse into Munro's own childhood."

This book is a multi-award-winner, and Munro herself won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.

Insights and Opinions

+ Our conversation opened with this question from Shirley: "Which of these stories do you remember most?" Now, this may seem an odd start to a book club discussion about a story collection, but we asked because we all admitted to having a hard time remembering any. Yet all of us had a strong memory of the book itself -- not the stories, not the plots, but the mood, the color, Munro's writing. When pressed, we flipped through our pages, calling out specific stories. "Oh yes, Train!" "Oh, of course, Amundson!" Munro takes you deeper than the story. How is that possible? It's Alice Munro magic.

+ Munro's characters are layered and often inscrutable. Their behavior is often surprising and sometimes inexplicable, but completely right for the story. We wondered if the motivation of Munro's characters was era-specific -- is it that the people in her stories are uncaring? Or, are they a reflection of a time in which reflection just wasn't done, where passion was kept in check?

+ Munro tells us herself, in the final line of her final semi-autobiographical essay, when she is explaining why she did not go home for her mother's last illness or funeral: "We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do -- we do it all the time."

+ From her warm-weather hideaway, Vickie sent us these notes:

"I was reminded of hearing Charles Baxter discuss "counterpointed characterization" when I was a student in the Warren Wilson MFA program. HIs lecture later became a chapter in his collection of essays on writing, Burning Down the House. (Here) is a quick summary...as described by writer Lee Martin in his blog:

'"In this chapter ("Counterpointed Characterization"), Baxter takes to task the conflict model for the structure of a short story. That is to say, the protagonist pitted against an antagonist; one person wants something, another person wants something else. Voila. Conflict. Baxter argues that stories often don't work that way. He says the conflict can actually be very slight in a short story, and that often counterpointed characterization creates the tension.

By counterpointed characterization, he means the pairing of characters who 'bring out a crucial response to each other.'"

+ Vickie pointed to "In Sight of the Lake" as one example which seems to place the man who meets Nancy in his private garden and leads her to the "home" as a counterpointed character to Nancy. This man has come to his home after a friend died. He is kind, but he does lead her to a very different kind of home -- one from which she will not have the ability to come and go as she pleases. The ending of this story is stunning and shows why Munro is such a master storyteller.

+ The last four autobiographical stories are an amazing group. It is so clear in these how she has used the themes of her life in her fiction, but these are looser and less tidy that her other short stories. Even in these, she can't avoid those mysterious people who appear in our past. As Vickie pointed out, "this story has another amazing ending, which shows me Alice Munro's honest but strangely ambiguous reaction to those things we do in this 'dear life'."

+ Linda, who had to miss our conversation, said by email: "There is a lot to commend Dear Life, especially the marvelous, interesting characters. I underlined several passages in the collection, but …. I loved this quote from "Dolly" -- 'Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry? And not too much or not too little, just enough."

+ In the final analysis, we agree: These are wonderful stories. All of them.

Other Details

+ Next month, we read The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, at Joanne's house.

+ For April, we will be reading a classic. After some names were batted around, we settled on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The motion carried.

A Work of Fiction that Mirrors A Frightening Reality

Title: Flight Behavior
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Host:  Gail

Barbara Kingsolver's latest work of fiction, Flight Behavior opens with young Dellarobia Turnbow's desperate climb from her narrow life in rural Appalachia up the mountain behind her home and toward an illicit affair sure to ruin her life. Instead, she is brought to her knees by an astounding sight -- "The forest blazed with its own internal light." She has no explanation for what she sees. "The burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she'd ever known, and still she was sure of it."

Monarchs clustered in trees near Angangueo, Michoacan, Mexico. 

What Dellarobia sees as a forest fire is, in fact, something more terrible. The entire population of East Coast monarch butterflies is wintering on an Appalachian hilltop instead of their natural winter haven in Mexico. Shifting weather patterns have upset the natural order, and the monarchs are in the wrong place, where the continued annual migration from Canada to Mexico and back is now in jeopardy. Soon, Dellabrobia's community is overrun with scientists, reporters, and sightseers, and her life spins forward on an unpredictable trajectory.

Insights and Opinions

+ Kingsolver is a gifted writer whose works we all look forward to reading. But while she has imagined an ingenious plot here, we found ourselves feeling the book veers too close to a polemic against anti-science boobs, with some characters who are more caricatures than fully rounded people we could believe. The female TV reporter represents more of a type than an individual, as do the graduate students. Even Ovid, who is a central character, reads flat and only comes fully to life toward the end of the book in the scenes that take place after his wife joins him on Dellarobia's land.

+ Through most of the book, Ovid exists only in Dellarobia's head. We see him entirely through her eyes and her imagination. But he never gets to be on stage, unless he's making a speech that supports the author's position.

+ Shirley observed that Kingsolver's women characters are the most fully realized. Dellarobia's husband  Cub seems so stunted -- and certainly that is Kingsolver's intention -- but his diminished self renders him more of a cardboard cutout on the page than the living, breathing, understandably limited man we wanted him to be. His limitations are so profound, it's difficult to believe that Dellarobia's friend Crystal finds him fascinating and attractive. There are writers who are weak at getting deeply into the opposite sex, and it doesn't hurt the book. But in this case, it does.

Female monarch butterfly in May

+ Kingsolver clearly has an agenda, and we get it. But she is preaching to the choir here.

+ Having said all that, the more we discussed the book, the more we found to like about it. Kingsolver's prose is a pleasure to read. Her small descriptions of life are sometimes stunning and profound, as when Dellarobia discovers that her mother-in-law Hester has always expected her to leave. "It was an earthquake, an upheaval of buried surfaces in which nothing was added or taken away. Her family was still her family, an alliance of people at odds, surviving like any other by turning the everyday blind eye." Kingsolver is a wonderful storyteller and an important voice. We just want her to write the people, not the cause.

Articles worth reading

Migration of Monarch Butterflies Shrinks Again Under Inhospitable Conditions

Migrating Monarch Butterflies in "Grave Danger," Hit New Low

Oddments and Telling Details

+ Our conversation kicked off with a round robin on each person's methods for maintaining physical balance, which mostly involved things to do while brushing one's teeth.

+ Joanne had actually been to the monarch over-wintering spot in Mexico, and brought pictures to share with us. Really quite wonderful.

+ If you have a yard or garden, do the butterflies a favor and plant some milkweed!

+ We chose a book for March: The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt