Blake's Reviews > Lives of Girls and Women

”It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his history, I would want to write things down.”

I put this down perhaps a year ago or more. Having read it to the end and put my thoughts about it to the forefront of my mind, I readied myself to write them out. But I found that my reviewer’s ink had dried up and caught my pen in its well. I didn’t write. I wish I had wanted then, as strongly as I do now, to write things down.

Lives of Girls and Women is a collection of inter-connected short stories centred on the experience of Del Jordan as she grows up in rural Ontario during the 1940s. Experiential centrality, however, should be read broadly. The stories are as often about the people who enter into Del’s experience as they are about those experiences that involve her as direct protagonist. In departing from the form of individually contained stories that her first collection and most of her subsequent ones took, I remember worrying all through the book that something had gone with it. Those revelatory features of Munro’s stories, those events that can be so gradual and shifting as to barely warrant being called “events” must suffer for this novel-length extension. I suspect that that worry is what stopped me writing this out previously - that it might lessen what the book is and could do. It had me questioning Munro’s choice of form. What I missed was that this very loss of Munro-ness occasioned a foray into storytelling that honoured others and otherness by rehearsing them.

Lives of Girls and Women is often called a novel and it bears similarities to Welty’s The Golden Apples, but I don’t know that I’ve fully appreciated until now (nor even now) what reflection on these side issues might have told me last year. The concern about this book’s status as a novel can be looked at too sternly. And in seeking too forwardly after an answer it’s rather easy to shrink your vision and miss a question sitting nearby and shining with pertinence. But in bringing Welty’s work into the picture – a work which is so much more sturdily possessive of its form and yet speaks its possessiveness softly – you can broaden your vision again. Welty’s is not a novel. Insofar as Munro collection is indebted to Welty’s, is Munro’s a novel? Or is it more in the tradition of Welty’s a collection apart from a novel, and yet honouring length to bring out the shifts in a short story collection without the dedication to centre as found in a novel?

Would that I could be thinking this out in these terms a year ago.