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."...This review is from Slate.
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].
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