ALICE MUNRO: Immigrant Song

Alice Munro's work eluded me until her newest work, The View From Castle Rock. It's a trusim that great writers teach you how to read their work, they insist on it, you must succumb to their particular prose and once conquered, you're conquered. Her work at times is arguably flawed -- particularly in this fascinating collection of stories drawn from letters, chronicles, and evidence of her family dating back to their migration from the darkest forms of Calvinism in Scotland in the eighteenth century, chronicling their struggles across the Atlantic into the present. The tales are at times brutal, at times poignant, uncompromising and unsentimental in their grittiness of the stark harshness of the life that was left and the new stark reality of eking out an existence in a world where the streets are not paved with gold.

But Munro's genius is in the subtletly and denseness with which she excavates precisely the nature of inner experience, juxtaposed against conditions of deprivation. Consider a passage like: Only from the inside of the faith is it possible to get any idea of the prize as well as the struggle, the addictive pursuit of pure righteousness, the intoxication of a flash of God's favor. OR: The child is turning somersaults in her belly. Her face is hot as a coal and her legs throb and the swollen flesh in between them... is a colding sack of pain. Her mother would have known which leaves to mash to make a soothing poultice. At the thought of her mother such misery overcomes her that she wants to kick somebody.

This book is writing on the grand scale. As Munro pulls into her fifties as opposed to the apocalyptic vision of Cormac McCarthy, she crafts a world of mythic intensity, built of blood and stone and labor, the chronicles of her forebears, a world in which birth and death complete and eternal cycle that offers the faintest glimpse of a gritty neorealist's version of resurrection against all odds.