TBR: Runaway
Today’s book is Alice Munro’s new collection of stories, Runaway.
As Jonathan Franzen commented in the NY Times Book Review, short stories are almost impossible to review. Synopses of their plots just don’t do them justice. So, his review (which appeared in the coveted front page spot) boils down to "Short stories are notoriously underrated. Alice Munro is a master of the art. This is a fabulous collection; trust me and go read it."
So, what can I say about this book, other than "trust me and go read it"?
Unlike Helen Simpson’s Getting a Life (which Franzen also praises highly, and I discussed here), I didn’t see myself in any of Munro’s characters. I didn’t find myself saying "ah, yes, that’s how it is; she captures exactly how that feels." But her characters aren’t exotic creatures either, but ordinary Canadian women.
After reading Runaway, I found myself looking at people walking down the street or riding in the metro, and wondering about what choices they had made in their lives that brought them to this moment. Munro’s stories are about people making small choices that have momentous consequences, or as Franzen puts it "moments of fateful, irrevocable, dramatic action." Except that they don’t look like moments of dramatic action: one woman gets off a bus; another woman excuses herself from talking to a boring stranger on a train; a third sits in a car while her boyfriend’s brother buys a bottle of liquor from a bootlegger.
