Against the Grain

Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
304pp

Alice Munro is one of those rare literary icons who has the distinct reputation as a crossover writer. She is admired by academics for her literary sensibilities, the mainstream for her easy-to-identify-with characters, and fiction writers who continue to be amazed at her ability to construct a strong story out of what Hollywood would consider to be the uneventful and ordinary—an impossible judgment to be made after reading “Free Radicals” and “Dimensions” in Munro’s latest collection, Too Much Happiness. Read More

I thought about love once
And then decided to
See a movie instead.

I thought about love again
Just yesterday as the
Inflated clouds dragged
Themselves through
The brush of blue sky
Sealing into paper-
Wrapping silence
One eager plane with its
Tired cargo of travelers.

And today, well,
I cannot tell a lie.
I’m thinking about love
In the middle of dinner
Following the odor of
Curry and brown rice,
And steam that rises
From my cold,
Uneventful plate.

Showing up on time
Is the easy part.

The dashboard of
My rented car
Free of dust,
Wax-clean,
Vacuumed carpets
And a lemon smelling
Tag dangling from
The rear view mirror.

One more look
In the sun-visor
Mirror, an angled glance
At the straggly sideburns.

Fly firmly zipped.

Spitting on my closed
Index fingers,
I drag them along
The creases of
My black pants.

I pull out a hanky,
And shoe-shine the tips
Of my eager shoes.

Gently tugging
The bottom of my red tie,
I firmly wrestle
With the knot
To shield the
Top button from
Strangers looking
For flaws.

I open my sport coat,
Lowering my head
Into the dark corners
Of both arm pits.

I turn off the
Impatient ignition,
Open the door,
And look up at
The scoop of a moon
Glancing down at
Familiarity.

It is difficult to write a review of a novel that has significant events that cannot be revealed without destroying the tension of those events. In the same vein, Internet film reviews often caution their readers that the review contains spoiler information that gives away key plot information.

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Sociologists have given us pretty accurate stats about the majority of us marrying or having intimate relationships, endogamously—that is, inside of our class, race, religion, and/or economic status. Exogamy is the exception, not the rule. Even if we know someone from another culture in the workplace, most of us still go home to our homogeneous and segregated communities.

The notion of marrying or living inside one’s own heritage and culture was constantly reinforced when I was growing up in the 1950s, an era that was in denial about how deep the racial and ethnic divides actually were.

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I  jokingly made the comment to a friend of mine that English majors, like myself, seem to revel in literature that’s hard to get the first time round. That doesn’t mean second readings don’t enhance our understanding of a work. It’s just that we sometimes distrust our I-get-it reactions as being superficial because they’re too immediate. For some reason, we seem to require wallowing around in the miasma of linguistic challenges.

Maybe it’s masochism or maybe we just have to prove to the world that we have some kind of secret knowledge of texts that are just beyond the ken of most mortals. And “stream of consciousness” writing is often one of our favorite genres. Similar to  academic art theorists commenting on abstract painting, it leaves us ample room to show others just how brilliant we are when the rest of the world doesn’t have a clue what the hell we’re talking about.

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I recently read a very touching story of an English couple who had gone to an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland to end their lives together. The wife, in her seventies, was a television producer, choreographer, and former ballerina. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her ailing, eighty-five year old husband, was a former BBC conductor and Verdi specialist.

Sir Edward Downes and his wife, Joan, both agreed to terminate their lives at the Dignitas clinic outside of Zurich.  Members of their family were at the  bedside of the couple and watched the elderly couple eventually die.

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Insanity as a literary theme has always had an audience—those ardent peeping-Toms who love to wallow around in somebody else’s mania. And there is something about the draw of a house fire or a mangled car on the Interstate that seeps into our indifference with the power of a jackhammer.

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