If ever you look up from whatever electronic gadget is flickering its screen at you, pause, and think, are we getting more stupid as the world gets faster?, a small antidote to despair can be found in a book such as Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.
I don’t mean that the book is like a piece of chocolate, momentarily comforting. It’s more like coming across a deep well of good water in an arid land. A book like this is proof positive that, despite predictions about the dire state of literature, our best writers write better than ever. However brilliant were the novels and stories of the past, no one in the 20th century wrote like this. Munro, and her fellow Canadian, Margaret Atwood, have invented a new hybrid form of short story and the results, I think, will be something like what happened in the wake of Truman Capote ‘inventing’ reportage in his book about two murderers, In Cold Blood.
They have made it possible to write in this highly charged space between the personal and the universal, the real and the transcendent. Continue reading ‘alice munro is sublime’
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