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Its not that the men are so special.
They are not the best-looking or the smartest.
And it does not take long for the protagonists, the women, to see this.
Because Alice Munro wrote these women, their perception is as merciless as hers.
Now, with that flush, she was sure of it.
Jeffrey casts Pauline in a play; she soon learns hes bullish and pretentious too.
Because Alice Munro wrote her, Pauline runs off with him anyway.
A running off with, an abandoning for, a void leapt into.
A flirt, a fuck, a disaster.
In Munros stories, sex changes women like a downed line changes a puddle.
They are charged with dangerous, unpredictable energy.
And this gives it strength.
Something to know about repressed societies: Its whats not said that is powerful.
Men didnt really want to talk to her.
Most women didnt either.
She wasnt stuck in that place, not entombed there.
Now between vacuuming and woolies she wrote fiction, desperately.
Short stories were a matter of housewifely convenience and then a matter of preference.
(Munro never published a novel something her supporters always seemed more sheepish about than she did.)
But her characters arent writers usually.
They might be unenthused editors or spinster librarians.
(I wonder why I wrote about aging spinsters, Munro toldThe Paris Review.
I didnt know any.
I think I knew that at heart I was an aging spinster.)
Many are poor or grew up that way.
What they share is a hypersensitivity to sexual possibility.
Munros stories are some of the smartest about being an idiot in lust.
When a man is awful, when he is petty, hes so familiar it is sickening.
Various special requirements had been attended to.
All disorder was order, carefully thought out and not to be interfered with.
You cant convince me this man isnt living down the street from me now.
And of course Lydia goes for him anyway.
She knows hes absurd, she knows hes not nice to her.
Its like the scorch of electricity.
Its like burnt kernels of wheat.
No, its like a bitter orange.
Is that Munro speaking?
Is it the man?
The sexual I give up is the Alice Munro experience.
It can be pleasurable or it can be painful, this giving-over to what you cant explain or excuse.
Attraction just puts you in a headlock.
As she got older, her stories roamed through time, moving backward and forward.
Knowing how a characters love affair shook out never made it seem simpler or less inevitable.
They married and stayed together until he died in 2013, the year Munro won the Nobel Prize.
When you know, you know.
And when you dont know, do it anyway.
