Alice Munro is known for her gift of shining a light on the cobwebs of life, finding the complicated traps we are inclined to ignore as we move through the mundane act of living. Munro, it has been said a thousand times before, makes the simple seem remarkable, the benign explosive. But in Too Much Happiness, for the first time, Munro writes stories that are dark and scathing, even without her delicate unearthing.
These are stories of murder, deception, dysfunction, and impenetrable loss. Told with Alice Munro’s usual piercing directness, they are often so grueling that they are difficult to read. We are almost convinced that these are everyday events yet simultaneously appalled at their innate cruelty, creating a great sense of angst and confusion. While Munro’s past stories have offered a sliver of a protagonist’s life that is enlightening and efficient, these stories often feel painfully unresolved.
The narratives she elucidates are sometimes so sharp and helplessly honest that they are hard to process. There is almost the urge to reach in and rescue the characters, never from their external enemies, but always from themselves. In the opening story, we meet Doree, a young woman who has reinvented herself after her husband kills their three children and cannot stop herself from frequently visiting him in a mental hospital.
This young woman’s mind is a twisted mystery; the reader is given facts but left to wonder about many things. She has changed her name, lied to a social worker, and slipped in and out of rational consciousness. Alice Munro can always be counted on to expose the concentrated truth, but here, she shows her ability to accurately and numbly report only the dizzying facts.
The stories in Too Much Happiness reflect both the saturation and the irony indicated in the title: The world of this book is simply the other side of the coin or the opposite of happiness. Sometimes, the tales are so scathingly dark that they seem like they ought to take place in another universe, but they are disarming because they are written with such bleak realism. That said, the truth of these tales has caused a slight shift in Munro’s writing style. Sometimes, the narrative sputters and races.
In “Face”, a child with a disfiguring birthmark is prevented from knowing of it by his overprotective mother. Disturbing interactions with a playmate reveal the truth and also spell doom for her when her own mother becomes bitter, jealous, and deranged. “Some Women”, the story of an ailing man’s seduction by his trashy nurse, moves on par with the chaotic urges of its controlling characters, only to reveal that true power is wielded in silence.
These stories are bumpy, whereas Alice Munro’s are usually smooth, and it is hard to say why. Perhaps by leaving her routine, she changed the tempo and rhythm of her writerly voice. Perhaps she struggled with the dark material as much as her readers will. The subjects of these stories are violence, sexual perversion, and gratuitous cruelty, and it is almost as though the content is at war with Munro’s natural ability to flow.
Often, the characters must act faster than they can think, creating an inherent anxiety in the text. In “Wenlock Edge”, a woman given a choice between humiliating seduction and impoliteness chooses the former without hesitation. Her dismay after this event is represented not by agony but by irritation. Like many of Alice Munro’s characters, the protagonists in this collection are trying to find clarity, but they bring an unprecedented sense of loss.
In “Free Radicals”, a woman dying of cancer with a month to live finds herself doing all she can to protect herself against an intruder. Given the “choice” between death now or death later, she is both elegantly calm and wildly imaginative, digging into her previously unacknowledged guilt. The question at the heart of this story, “what’s the point of one more month of life, anyway?” might summarize the painful, forceful tug that lives beneath all the stories in this collection.
Every character in these stories seems to teeter on the edge of life and death, good and evil, hope and ambivalence. The tales in Too Much Happiness represent the world’s underbelly, clawing to turn the tides of judgment and fate.