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J. R. (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corinne Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Christine Lorre
p. 253-258
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J. R. (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corinne Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2024)

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1In June 2013, before the announcement on October 10 that same year that Alice Munro was laureate of the Nobel Prize for literature, the critic Christian Lorentzen published a contentious article in the London Review of Books. In it, he stated his confusion about the “consensus around Alice Munro,” which consists in “instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings.” These, to Lorentzen, include Munro’s conventionality, the provinciality of the setting of her stories, “her manipulation of time—her tick of adding a coda to a story, marked usually by the words ‘years later,’” and more, all of which lead to a state of “mental torpor” and sadness for the critic, after having read ten of Munro’s fourteen collections.

2The four co-authors of Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices (2024), together with Robert Thacker, who signed the introduction, represent the exact opposite kind of readers of Munro that Lorentzen enacts. They have all been reading Munro for several decades and keep coming back to her short fiction, finding more to it with each re-reading. As a quartet, the image of the musical suite in the subtitle points at a combination of diversity and complementariness among them, in a composition meant to reveal and educate.

3The notion of successive periods in Munro’s writing career implicit in the “breakthrough books” of the title underlies the idea behind the book structure, as conceived by J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Robert Thacker, as he recalls in the introduction and argued in his 2005 biography of Munro (Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. A Biography), sees a few “fulcrum points” (1) in Munro’s career, the central one being her return to Ontario: “By 1975 she had left her marriage (1951-76) in British Columbia and returned to her native Huron County, Ontario and there found her material, the place and the culture she had long contemplated and had written about from the West Coast (1952-73), lying all about” (2). To Thacker, such caesura moments mark shifts in the evolution of Munro’s writing; he thus distinguishes her “late style” works, comprising her five last collections—Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009), and Dear Life (2012). Thacker sees the last three of these as Munro’s “testamentary acts” which he explored in his most recent book, Alice Munro’s Late Style: “Writing is the Final Thing” (3). Struthers in turn builds upon this periodization to focus on what he sees as Munro’s four “breakthrough books,” which directly precede her “late style”: The Progress of Love (1986), Friend of My Youth (1990), Open Secrets (1994), and The Love of a Good Woman (1998). In the four chapters of the book, each of the four authors studies on of these four collections, in that order.

4Struthers has a theory about the structure of each of these short story collections, which is applied as a method, providing a creative constraint that contributes to the inner structure of Breakthrough Books. Struthers’s theory is “derived from an analogy to baseball, about the opening three stories of a collection as frequently being arranged in a special way with particular purposes. More recently I have found myself wondering if the closing three stories of a collection might be arranged in much the same way but in reverse” (46). To explore this theory, each of the four chapters focuses more specifically on the first three stories of each collection it is devoted to, while additional parts frame these analyses and introduce specific points the author makes about the collection, while the closing story or stories are analyzed as a coda to the whole. It is worth noting that Struthers applied a comparable structuring method to one of the two volumes on Munro that he edited. In Alice Munro Everlasting: Essays on Her Work II (2020), which focuses on the resonance of Munro’s stories, fourteen essays are each devoted to the final story of one of Munro’s fourteen collections, and study how these final stories stay with the reader. It is a method that emphasizes close reading, as well as structure, considering the internal dynamic of the stories (or collections) as units. But it also establishes parallels with other stories, by Munro and by other writers, exploring the many resonances of the texts.

5Robert Thacker’s introduction frames the volume, laying out the periodization of Munro’s works to emphasize how the four books studied here represent “a middle style within Munro’s career” (3). Importantly, Thacker also recalls how, “by the time Munro turned to the making of The Moons of Jupiter what I have called her ‘literary triumvirate’ was in place. That is, her New York agent Virginia Barber who monitored her career and offered first response to completed stories; her Canadian editor Douglas Gibson at Macmillan of Canada and then at McClelland & Stewart; and her New York editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Ann Close” (5). Most stories in the four collections studied in Breakthrough Books were first published in The New Yorker, a sign that Munro was then acknowledged as an important writer by her professional milieu.

6J. R. (Tim) Struthers starts his chapter, “Seeing in Circles: The Fierce Originality of The Progress of Love (1986),” by following his theory and establishing connections among the stories of the collection, seeing endless circles of links and associations through which meaning proliferates. He then conducts a close reading of the first three stories, falling into a rabbit-hole of interpretation, analyzing in turn onomastics, metaphor, allegory, symbols, metafictional allusions, intertextual parallels (what he calls “literary archaeology” [27]), linguistic forms (i.e. euphemisms), colors, Freudian images, clichés, consonances, wordplays, and more. Using the first-person plural “we,” he associates his fellow readers with his investigations and hypothesizes about Munro’s considerations when composing a collection or a story. About “The Progress of Love,” he concludes that like other Munro narratives, it ponders on the nature of “divine interventions in human lives” (23). “Lichen” he envisions as “an allegory of love and hate” (33) and reveals abundant Biblical intertext in “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux.” Struthers thus provides the reader with a profuse, personal reading of the stories.

7In “‘The Old Order Changeth’: Change, Renovation and Modernity in Friend of My Youth (1990),” Ailsa Cox approaches the collection and the first three stories through the notion of change, both in plot and narrative structure, which enables her to deal with all sorts of transformations. She analyzes how characters relate to the past, which they reinterpret, in search of enlightenment. Cox then links the title story, which focuses on a mother-daughter relationship complicated by illness, to “The Peace of Utrecht” (Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968) and “The Ottawa Valley” (Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, 1976) to demonstrate how Munro’s attitude towards her own mother changed over time. She analyzes Maria, the immigrant character in “Five Points,” as the embodiment of a threshold between tradition and modernity. And points out how the amateur historian in “Meneseteung,” along with the coda to the story, reminds the reader that “the past is always open to reinterpretation, and that every story is just one version of a tale that is always subject to revision” (77). More generally, Cox concludes that change is omnipresent in Munro’s narratives in the way perspectives shift, and so does the reading of the world.

8Corinne Bigot, in “The Art of Misreading; or, The Driving Force of Misunderstanding: Open Secrets (1994),” identifies darkness as the central theme of the collection. While paying special attention to the first three stories, she covers them all, pointing at the unity of the selection through the location of most plots (Carstairs), the recurrence of dead or maimed bodies, and violence, which characters often look away from. Bigot further observes how “Munro often tells stories through the eyes of characters who fail to understand other people, or misread the world around them, or are reluctant to see what they are supposed to notice” (93). She also establishes some convincing literary parallels: how a scene in “Carried Away” of horses pulling sleighs echoes a similar scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or how the focus on marriage in “A Real Life” is reminiscent of that central theme in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In “The Albanian Virgin,” she sees metamorphoses that recall those, based on animal similes, that are found in Ovid’s classic tales. Citing Vanessa Guignery’s notion of “intertextual polyphony,” Bigot defends the position that “these echoes and faint voices enrich our reading experience rather than direct it” (118). She further explores the idea of “erratic reading,” a phrase she borrows from Michel Charles, to encourage readers to “stray from the path set by the author” (122). Another image exploring the same idea is that used by Jean-Jacques Lecercle of the “tin-opener theory of interpretation,” according to which there would be a true meaning to the text for readers to discover, which Bigot (following Lecercle) goes against, inviting readers instead to discover their own meaning, making pregnant mistakes in the process. Bigot concludes that “our reactions are evidence that Munro’s stories always induce us to read creatively” (125), a process that she illustrates in her own reading.

9“Rereading The Love of a Good Woman (1998),” by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, reflects on the productive process of re-reading, which Munro herself practices, and which her stories call for. Reinforcing some aspects of reading explored earlier in Corinne Bigot’s chapter, Ross points out how “[i]nstabilities of interpretation arise because different elements in a particular story are noticed (or not noticed) and given differing relative emphasis by different readers and by the same reader at different times of reading. . . . Readers give extra attention to themes that resonate with their own lives” (129-30). Ross exemplifies this in a personal rereading of “The Love of a Good Woman,” in which she gives more weight to the boys and their inability to talk to the adults about what they saw. She then puts “Jakarta” in perspective by grouping it with “Mischief” (The Beggar Maid, 1978) and “Comfort” (Hateship, 2001), analyzing the “elegiac sense of the winding down of life and the depletion of energy” the story produces (148). Finally, Ross reads “Cortes Island,” the third story, as a variant of “The Office” (Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968), but its ending gives it a different twist, leaving the reader to wonder about implications. The chapter closes with an inquiry about “ordinary readers” of Munro, based on data Ross collected in 1999 from a reading group, and which concludes, again, that readers are drawn into rereading, always finding new meaning to the elements of the stories. The inquiry seems a bit dated, or in need of an update, but it may be the case that Ross, who died in September 2021, did not have time to wrap up her chapter with a final revision.

10To close this review of Breakthrough Books, I would like in turn to propose a kind of instant rereading of the book—or a mental look back—having just finished it. Things have changed since the revelations on July 4, 2024 by Munro’s third daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, of her being abused as a girl by her stepfather, Gerry Fremlin—Munro’s second husband. This announcement wreaked havoc among Munro readers, many feeling betrayed, as women especially, by Munro’s reaction and lack of support when confronted with Andrea’s experience. Breakthrough Books was on the production track (its official publication date being October 31, 2024) before the publication of Skinner’s Toronto Star article on July 4, that same year. What is striking though, reading the book in 2025, is Bigot’s prescient insistence on the darkness of Open Secrets and how “Munro draws attention to the role played by silent witnesses and to those who fail to understand what they are meant to see” (93). Along the same lines, Ross observes at the start of her chapter, about her rereading of The Love of a Good Woman, perhaps also drawing on her insight into Munro’s life as her first biographer (Alice Munro: A Double Life, 1992): “What strikes me this time round is the prominence of children, especially abused children. . . . Unprotected by the adults who should be caring for them, these children are variously neglected, orphaned, abandoned, bullied, fought over, exposed to danger and in three stories nearly killed” (128). Abuse was there, in the stories, and these readers, in their response to the texts, sensed that something unbearable was going on, which they implicitly credited to Munro’s exceptional writerly talent. And yet—

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Bibliographie

Lorentzen, Christian. “Poor Rose.” London Review of Books 35.11 (2013): 11-12. Print.

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. Print.

Skinner, Andrea Robin. “My Stepfather Sexually Abused Me When I Was a Child. My Mother, Alice Munro, Chose to Stay with Him.” Toronto Star 4 Jul. 2024. Print.

Struthers, J. R. (Tim), ed. Alice Munro Everlasting: Essays on Her Works II. Toronto: Guernica, 2020. Print.

Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. A Biography. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005. Print.

Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro’s Late Style: “Writing Is the Final Thing. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Print.

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Christine Lorre, « J. R. (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corinne Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2024) »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 253-258.

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Christine Lorre, « J. R. (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corinne Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2024) »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 12 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4955

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Auteur

Christine Lorre

Université de Caen Normandie – ERIBIA (ED 558)

Christine Lorre is Professor in English at the University of Caen Normandy. Her research focuses on postcolonial literature, particularly Canadian and New Zealand, the genre of the short story, gender, and environmental humanities. She is the co-author, with Ailsa Cox, of The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (Fahrenheit, 2015) and co-editor, with Eleonora Rao, of Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction: A Book with Maps in It (Camden House, 2018). She is the current President of the SEPC (French Society for Postcolonial Studies) and of EACLALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies).

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