Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro

Trouble began, perhaps, as soon as they said that they loved each other. Why did they do that--defining, inflating, obscuring whatever it was they did feel? It seemed to be demanded, that was all--just the way changes, variations, elaborations in the lovemaking itself might be demanded. It was a way of going further. So they said it, and that night Georgia couldn't sleep. She did not regret what had been said or think that it was a lie, though she knew it was absurd. She thought of the way Miles sought to have her look into his eyes during lovemaking--something Ben expressly did not do--and she thought of how his eyes, at first bright and challenging, became cloudy and calm and sombre. That way she trusted him--it was the only way. She thought of being launched out on a gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea. Love.

In "Oranges and Apples," a story in Alice Munro's collection Friend of My Youth, a man named Murray comes home to see his wife suntanning by the pool, and Victor, his friend who has been staying in the pool house after a rough split with his wife, watching her through binoculars. Something in her body language makes Murray certain Barbara is aware of Victor, even arranging herself for him to sea. Murray spins this moment into a rage-inducing fantasy of betrayal, even going so far as to arrange for Victor and Barbara to be alone together, as if to confirm his own nightmare by forcing it to become true. In "Goodness and Mercy," young Averill listens to the captain of a passenger ship tell a story of an elderly woman who once died on board, and whom he buried at sea. Averill becomes convinced he is talking about her; after all, she is on board with her elderly and terminal mother, both of whom suspect she may expire before journey's end. Somehow, without even uttering a word, Averill comes to believe she is collaborating with the captain in a fantasy in which, her mother having been discarded, she is free to be seduced by him.

Friend of My Youth is probably the most subdued of all the collections of Munro's I've ever read. Some disasters remain--a drowning, a boy blinded by a rake, and any number of tawdry affairs--but they are somehow less real than the things that do not happen; the lives that people live in their own head, simply because the ones they really do lead are too narrow, or because everyone really wishes they could lead more than a single life at a time. This is the impulse that leads to the cuckold fantasy of "Oranges and Apples," and the dead-mom-sex-with-the-boat-captain fantasy of "Goodness and Mercy." "Differently" is another version of "Oranges and Apples" in which Georgia abandons her closest friend because of a notion--not even a belief or a conviction, it doesn't even quite get that far; it doesn't need to--that she has bedded Georgia's lover. In "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," a woman travels at last to the small town in Scotland where her now-dead husband spent the happy years of his deployment, only to discover that no one remembers him and he probably invented the relationships he had with every one of them.

Perhaps it's this impulse that leads Munro's characters, especially women, to pursue affairs with men they know are unattractive, and don't really like.  Perhaps this impulse leads to the many lies that are told. In one of my favorites in the collection, "Pictures of the Ice," an elderly minister goes around showing his parishioners a photo of the woman in Hawaii he plans on marrying, and describing the life he'll live out there in retirement. Meanwhile, his true intentions are to take a position exactly like the one he has now, in an even more frigid and remote part of Ontario. Or maybe he's the inverse of all the others: the man who loves his single life so much he wants to live a version of it forever, and must pretend to have dreams for the sake of others.

Fantasies, lies, telling stories. Many of the stories are really about telling stories. The narrator of the title story hears second-hand, from her mother, a story about a woman who gives up her fiancé when he impregnates her own sister. In the mother's version, the woman is saintly, self-sacrificial; but the narrator wants to write the version wherein the woman is proud and controlling, all too happy to have her sister and former lover under her roof to arrange their lives according to a logic of guilt and shame: "a Presbyterian witch." Of course, we never are to know who the "real" Flora was; such questions are barely worth mentioning. What the story is really about is the writing of the story--though it is also about her mother, and about mothers. In "Meneseteung," an unnamed narrator tells the story of an underappreciated Ontario writer who lived a life of spinsterhood; though the details are drawn from the writer's journals, we are keenly aware that the gaps are filled with supposition and invention. There's no other way. Even stories that don't seem to be about stories are: Georgia of "Differently" is told by a creative writing instructor, in a nice Munrovian touch, that her stories contain "Too many things": "The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out."

Sometimes Munro's stories are set in Vancouver or Victoria or Toronto, but they're most often set in small-town Ontario, and those that are always feel as if they are set in the very same place. Maybe they are. In Lives of Girls and Women, the town is called Jubilee; in Friend of My Youth, it's Walley. One of the secondary themes of all the stories is that way that Walley has changed, the way that towns change, and the way the 1950's housewife world has passed into something different--and not necessarily better. People return to Walley and see its changes, as they make note of the changes in their old friends, and in themselves. I think you have to squint a little, dig a little deeper, to find the richness and drama in Friend of My Youth, like you do with a town like Walley. When I think back on Munro's stories, I don't know that any of the ones from this collection will be on the forefront of my mind. Small towns are like that, too: sometimes they blend together, and sometimes you forget them altogether. But they are still out there, full of life and living.