The final story in Alice Munro's collection, Open Secrets, is called "Vandals." As with so many of Munro's stories, it has several layers, so that it's difficult to tell--or tell at first--where the center lies. One layer is Bea, a woman who leaves her staid boyfriend for Ladner, a gruff taxidermist who keeps a maintains a kind of self-made nature trail on his rustic property. Another layer is Liza, who lived across the street from Ladner and Bea as a young girl, and who now, as Ladner is in the hospital dying, is asked to watch after their house. With her husband in tow, she enters the house and proceeds to smash everything in it. We must read between the lines to make sense of this shocking act, and the truth is only glancingly suggested--that Ladner sexually abused Liza and her brother when they were children. Here--content warning--is our only clue:
When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose form its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look at him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.
To say the least, I was floored by this story. I expected some of the stories in Open Secrets to mirror in uncomfortable ways the recent revelation that Munro stuck by her own husband for years after he sexually abused her daughter. But I didn't expect to read a story that so perfectly mirrored it that it left me with the discomforting feeling that it must have been drawn, with horrible clarity, from Munro's own life.
For me, nothing more really needs to be said about Munro the person beyond what Brandon Taylor wrote in his thoughtful substack post about Andrea Skinner and her abuser, Gerald Fremkin. "People can justify anything to themselves," Taylor wrote. "Is that so interesting?" The story is a horrible one, and it is primarily horrible because of what happened to Andrea Skinner; what it has done to Alice Munro's reputation, or our image of her, is so comparatively unimportant it almost feels like an insult to focus on it. But contrary to what other people have said, I don't find it very surprising. Why should it be surprising to me? I never met Alice Munro the person; what do I know about what she is capable of? Actually, I think that those who say it is surprising because Munro writes so eloquently about abuse and our capacities for repression have it exactly backward. Who better to write about particular failures and flaws than someone who shares them? To put it another way, is there any reason in expecting an author to be better than the characters they write about?
"Vandals" begins with a letter. (Open Secrets is unique among Munro's collections for how many letters there are, I think: "Carried Away" focuses on a series of letters between a librarian and her secret admirer; in "The Jack Randa Hotel," a jilted wife secretly follows her husband to Australia and writes letters to him under an assumed name; "A Wilderness Station," about a murdered frontiersman and his suspect wife, is entirely epistolary.) This letter is from Bea to Liza, and it describes a strange dream: Bea is at a Canadian Tire (think lumberjack Sears) where buckets of bones have been laid out for purchase; she takes what she thinks are Ladner's bones, but which are too light. They prove to be the bones of a young girl, or boy, or both. This, we suspect, is the subconscious admitting to Bea that she knew exactly what was going on with Ladner, and did nothing to stop it. The conscious Bea admits it, too, buried deep in the exculpatory language of dreams. This is the most, we sense, that we will ever get from her. In retrospect, it is chilling to think of "Vandals" as a story that functions in the same way that Bea's letter does within it. Munro's knowledge, and guilt, are buried here, jumbled up but in plain sight--an open secret.
"Vandals" is, for better and worse, the best story in the collection. I also really enjoyed "The Jack Randa Hotel"; the letters the wife writes, pretending to be a recently deceased Australian to whom her husband has reached out, thinking they may be related--Munro was always one to write a plot that's hard to stuff into a sentence--are very funny in their playful cruelty. Of another tone and spirit entirely is "The Albanian Virgin," a fascinatingly un-Munro-like story about a woman who is trapped in a rustic Albanian village after a horse accident and nearly sold into marriage with a Muslim traveler. The woman saves herself by becoming a "virgin," a woman who refuses marriage and lives as a man. OK, I said it was not Munro-like, but that's a very Munrovian image, isn't it? It's just one of several images in the collection of women who escape the trap of bourgeois life by "going wild" in some way. Such a list would also include the frontier wife of "A Wilderness Station," as well, I think, as the strange young neighbor of "Spaceships Have Landed" who disappears from her home and comes back telling people that she's been abducted.
In a way, that's the message of a lot of Munro's stories. You can play along, or you can get out. Both are a kind of madness, but you get to choose your flavor of madness. You can go up with the spaceships, maybe, or shave your head and eat at the men's table. Or you can tell yourself and others the kind of self-soothing lies that keep the monstrosity of domestic life going. You can judge for yourself which way Munro herself chose.
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