Lives of Girls and Women

Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel by Alice Munro

I am ashamed that this if the first time I have read Alice Munro - one of the great Canadian authors of our time - what kind of librarian am I? To my defence, I'm not usually interested in short story collections, just when it gets interesting, the story ends! Lives of Girls and Women is her only novel and one which draws on her childhood in Ontario during the 1940's. For those of you who do not like historical fiction, don't let this deter you if you enjoy coming of age novels. There is something tantalating and delicious about turning each page awaiting the inevitable first experiences with "sex, birth and death" and even more so when it is so realitically portrayed, as in this semi-autobiographical novel. When I began this novel, I truly thought my grandmother might enjoy it having been raised on a farm in Manitoba, but after a few pages I realized that there was a darkness that wouldn't agree with her. Munro is shockingly candid in portraying people for all their faults, deceptions, and desires.

Del Jordan is the daughter of a silver martin farmer a mother who takes boarders and goes door to door selling encyclopedias to make ends meet. Stories weave in and out...a neighbour who gains a wife to an advertisement in the paper for a woman with one child seeking a housekeeping position "matrimony if suited" and finds himself married at the train station on arrival with tragic consequences. Del's first love almost drowns her for the sake of baptizing her into a marriageable state...Del's own pursuit of religion, sneaking into the Anglican church and unsuccessfully seeking God despite her agnostic mother's disapproval. These are good tales that share a place and a time where a girl felt compelled to follow a certain path. Del choses her own way, not without experiencing the way it might have been and then suddenly awaking as though from a dream.

"There was a house in Jubilee with three prostitutes in it....On sunny days the two younger women would sometimes come out and sit in canvas chairs. They wore print dresses and slippers; their white legs were bare. One of them was reading Star Weekly...Naomi said that this one's name was Peggy....I wished I had seen more of this Peggy thant the soft, mouse-brown nest of curls above the paper; I wish I had seen her face. I did expect something- a foul shimmer of corruption, some emanation like marsh gas. I was suprised, in a way, that she would read a paper, that the words would mean the same things to her, presumably, that they meant to the rest of us, that she ate and drank like a human still. I though of her as having gone right beyond human fuctioning into a condition of perfect depravity, at the opposite pole from sainthood but similarly isolated, unknowable. What appeared to be ordinariness here- Star Weekly, dotted curtains looped back, geraniums growing hopefully out of tin cans in the whorehouse window, seemed to me deliberate and tantalizing deception - the skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust."

And a quote I quite like as it relates to multi-modality, a concept I'm looking at with my research right now...

"Believe me," he said, " I wish you luck in your life."

"Then he did the only special thing he ever did for me. With those things in his hands, he rose on his toes like a dancer, like a plump ballerina. This action, accompanied by his delicate smile, appeared to be a joke not shared with me so much as displayed for me, and it seemed also to have a concise meaning, a stylized meaning- to be a letter, or a whole word, in an alphabet I did not know."

"People's wishes, and their other offerings, were what I took then naturally, a little distractedly, as if they were never anything more than my due."

"Yes," I said, instead of thank you.