The View from Castle Rock , and: Mothers and Sons (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The View from Castle Rock, and: Mothers and Sons Judith Grossman (bio) Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 349 pp. Colm Tóibín, Mothers and Sons (Scribner, 2007), 270 pp. Alice Munro’s thirteenth book, The View from Castle Rock, carries an implicit message of valediction, preoccupied as it is with the writer’s origins and her mortality. While insisting in the Foreword that these are “stories,” Munro also concedes a few lines earlier that she has turned towards a personal past, “doing something closer to what a memoir does—exploring a life, my own life.” Part One of the book recalls, with characteristic indirection, her family’s history rather than her own (mainly through the Laidlaw paternal line), following hardscrabble shepherds, poor cousins of the Scottish writer James Hogg, through the ordeals of emigration to become farmers in the Canadian wilderness; and it ends with passages from her own father’s written recollection of those immigrants in old age. Yet it’s wholly consistent with Munro’s method of work that to explore any life means entering a complex narrative, branching out through time and through social and geographic space until we confront the mystery of self as both singular and plural, moment and location. “No Advantages,” the subtitle of this first section, derives from an early nineteenth-century account of the Ettrick Valley, home of the Laidlaw shepherds (Wordsworth’s famous elegy for James Hogg describes the place as “a bare and open valley,” although he goes on to embellish the scene with “golden leaves upon the pathways”). The dismissive phrase might also apply to the context of Alice Munro’s own childhood in Wingham, Ontario, to which she returns in Part Two. Her parents’ respectable poverty deepened with the collapse of a fox-farming enterprise and with the onset of her mother’s crippling illness, which threw the burden of housekeeping on Munro as the eldest daughter. “I waxed the worn linoleum. I ironed the worn dishtowels as well as the shirts and blouses, I scoured the battered pots and pans and took steel wool to the blackened metal shelves behind the stove.” The story of her escape to university as a scholarship student, against the odds, became a recurrent motif in her fiction—inseparable from the quickly made first marriage that would lock [End Page 649] the door against going back. For Munro knew, as all working-class girls of her era did, that she would be expected to return home until she got married. No wonder that a fear of domestic imprisonment haunts many young women in her stories. Hence too the quality of desperation in the announcement of Munro’s engagement here—“I meant to hang on to him”—along with her willed determination to love her fiancé, just as he was bent on rescuing her. The drama of this enormous leap in the dark is definitively rendered in “The Beggar Maid,” although Munro developed fresh variations in “Family Furnishings” and the superb late story “Post and Beam.” In each version the husband is given a different name—Patrick, or Brendan—and in the final, bleak and penitent rendering here, Michael (Wikipedia gives it as James): “He deserved better than me, Michael did. He deserved a whole heart.” But a whole heart would be precisely what Munro’s young women couldn’t have, given the divided loyalties that come with upward mobility. Leaving home (when a home has been all your endowment) is enough of a betrayal without remaking yourself in the image of another’s desire. In other ways, too, The View from Castle Rock becomes a revelatory sourcebook for Munro’s fiction. “The Wilds of Morris Township,” quoting verbatim from a great-uncle’s memoir, shows how that document was mined for Munro’s indelible story, “A Wilderness Station.” Notably, while the published records and memoirs were kept in this family by men, it’s the briefly named, hard-laboring women that Munro’s work pulls into the foreground. There is a passion for justice at work in “A Wilderness Station.” On the other hand, the writer’s grasp of her world’s severities...