Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

All his life--he had difficulty saying this, as he admitted, being always too wary of too much enthusiasm--all his life he had been waiting for such a student to come into this room. A student who would challenge him completely, who was not only capable of following the strivings of his own mind but perhaps of flying beyond them. He had to be careful about saying what he really believed--that there must be something like intuition in a first-rate mathematician's mind, some lightning flare to uncover what has been there all along. Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet.

When he finally brought himself to say all this to Sophia, he also said that there were those who would bridle at the very word, "poet," in connection with mathematical science. And others, he said, who would leap at the notion all too readily, to defend a muddle and laxity in their own thinking.

With all respect to Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro is the best to ever do it. She gets called "our Chekhov"--the Chekhov of the English language--with some regularity, but I don't think even Chekhov, as much a playwright as a short story writer, even approached the short story with the ferocity and genius that Alice Munro does. It's a gift, I think, to be living in the era of Alice, even if she has given up the writing of stories in her old age.

But all of that makes the title story of the collection Too Much Happiness, the most self-consciously Chekhovian thing Munro has ever written, all the more interesting. "Too Much Happiness" is the real-life story of Sophia Kovalevsky, the Russian mathematician who was, before Marie Curie, perhaps the best known female scientist in Europe. It's story that's strange for Munro in several ways: first, because it's a fictionalized rendition of a true story, second, because it's set in the nineteenth century, and third, because it's set in Europe, rather than Canada. And yet Kovalevsky's story resounds with the themes that Munro takes up all the time: the dignity of common lives, the transformative power of illness, the persistent oppression and marginalization of women.

Sophia is a brilliant mathematician who soon overtakes her own tutor, the German Weierstrass, and the story opens as she receives Europe's most prestigious mathematics prize, but she still requires the string-pulling of her male benefactors to get a job offer, and even then only in frigid Sweden, which she hates. Sophia's life has touched upon great things: her brother-in-law was a leader of the Paris Commune, and her sister gave her life to be attached to his kind of adventuresome bravado. And yet Sophia herself finds herself drawn not to a man like Jaclard but the spinster sisters of her tutor Weierstrass, who toil, not unhappily, to make the home in which his great work is done. She seesaws between the feverishness of her mathematical work and a deep satisfaction in a life of domestic and social pleasures; in the present of the story she is anticipating a happy marriage to another clever and larger-than-life Russian. "She was learning," Munro writes, "quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood--that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It  could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone." Yet neither Weierstrass, nor Jaclard, nor her fiance Maksim, nor her friend the mathematician Poincare, seem to think of such lives as opposed to one another.

The other stories are more standard Munrovian fare, and a few of them are among her best work. Especially powerful are those which are concerned with shocking violence, which, despite the domestic surface of Munro's stories, is something that lurks not far below the surface. In "Free Radicals," a sickly widow is briefly trapped in her home by a stranger who confesses that he has just murdered his family, including his mentally disabled sister, who he considered a drain on his own independence. This story finds frightening echoes in "Child's Play," one of the darkest stories Munro has ever written, about (spoiler alert) a woman who, as a child, and with an accomplice she has only recently met at summer camp, drowns another mentally disabled child. This act of momentary compulsion has transformed the life of the narrator, who has become an academic studying cultural ideas about mental disability, but who seems unable to deal with her own deed in any direct way. As disturbing as "Free Radicals" is, it's "Child's Play" that takes the darker route, as if putting us in the viewpoint not of the trapped widow but the killer. Once inside that head we are shocked to find no sadist, but only a very normal person, driven to a horrible act by the most recognizable of feelings: disgust, shame, and a need to be liked.

The story I think will stick with me most, though, is the opener "Dimensions," about a woman whose husband kills their three children. The husband, remanded by the court to a mental hospital, writes to the narrator, explaining that he has seen their children in another dimension, a place where they still exist, and the narrator, despite herself, finds this to be comforting. The rambling and esoteric voice of the letters the husband writes to the narrator have a kind of voice you might never know Munro was capable of writing, and captures something true about our willingness to step outside the bounds of logic and reasoning--with no contempt for those who must--in order to face the most difficult truths in life. And though there's no real violence to it, I loved the undercurrent of masculine viciousness in "Wenlock Edge," about a college student whose roommate convinces her to have dinner with her--I don't know what to call it but a sugar daddy--who instructs her to take off her clothes. Though she complies out of compulsive fascination, the narrator expects to be assaulted, only to be given a pleasant meal and a conversation about Greek philosophy.

Even one of the weaker stories, "Deep-Holes," provides a key to understanding Munro's stories: while hiking with his family, a boy falls into a deep glaciated hole and breaks both his legs. He grows up to be a kind of sour hippie who cuts ties with his mother, except when he wants money for his commune, and we are left to wonder whether this has something to do with the experience of falling into the hole as a child. Munro would never be so crude as to suggest that there's a causal line between the two--more likely they are both representations of the character's contemptuousness for boundaries and carefulness--but the image of the deep hole, lurking under the brush of life, ready to swallow you and break your bones, is one that rings true.