EclectEcon

Economics and the mid-life crisis have much in common: Both dwell on foregone opportunities

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre; c'est la pomme de terre . . . . . . . . . . . . . email: jpalmer at uwo dot ca


. . . . . . . . . . .Richard Posner should be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

More on Alice Munro's Runaway

Alice Munro is a famous short-story writer. She lives part-time in my home town, Clinton, Ontario (population 3200). Here is a recent review of her latest collection, Runaway:
Runaway reveals that Munro is up to some tricks of her own. It's no accident that the story that most explicitly relies on theatricality and self-consciously classical plot devices is called Tricks."...
What galls about "Tricks" is that it so explicitly and self-consciously tries to bring the reader up short; the story's drama is theatrically stylized. ... The problem is that we're so accustomed to realism we bridle at Munro's insistence that storytelling like this has lessons of its own—what's spelled out in the final paragraphs seems unfamiliarly overt, and it's difficult to sort out what seems facile about this ending from its disorienting power to jar [our expectations].
This review is from Slate.
 
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