Alice Munro does not have an MFA degree. She comes from a time when few Americans, and even fewer Canadians, found it necessary or expedient to pursue graduate study in creative writing. Though Munro was not produced by the MFA culture, she has been embraced by it to an extent unparalleled by any other living writer. When I visited the MFA program where I eventually enrolled, I was only a minute or two into a conversation with a second-year student when he asked, “Do you love Alice Munro?” Before I could answer, he added, “Because everybody here really loves Alice Munro.” It was true. One professor diagrammed the craft of Munro’s stories on a wipe board, using a complex notation of cylinders and arrows I struggled to understand. In another workshop, each student was required to choose a story from Munro’s Selected Stories and introduce it to the class. (I picked “The Turkey Season” and was impressed by the easy, unforced rhythms of the dialogue, though I don’t remember noticing much else.) Last Thursday, when the Nobel Prize was announced, the euphoria among my writer friends and acquaintances was palpable. There seemed to be a common feeling that Munro was ours, a writer’s writer uniquely beloved by the workshop.
When I began teaching, I couldn’t miss the fact that excerpts from Munro’s stories were used to illustrate almost every principle of craft. In the textbook most commonly assigned in introductory fiction classes, Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, she is cited in the sections on effective use of subtext in dialogue, on how to move over long spaces of time in summary, and on revision. No other writer — with the possible exception of Chekhov, to whom she is often compared — seems to have this universal applicability. It would be possible, one imagines, to read a Munro collection as certain people read the Bible, opening the book at random and sticking a pin down on the page. Surely you couldn’t fail to come up with a passage that would illuminate your own understanding of technique, and do it in a style that seemed both accessible and effortless. In those early years, I dutifully taught and studied Munro’s stories, but when I wanted to reread a story for the sheer pleasure of it, I went not to The Beggar Maid but to Junot Diaz’s Drown, or to Selected Stories of Andre Dubus. I appreciated Munro, I respected her, but — as we’ve all surely learned by our mid-twenties — that’s not the same as being in love.
We live in an era when North American readers are increasingly well-versed in the language of the writer’s craft. Book reviews in the New York Times and other major venues routinely focus in on questions of delineation of character and the construction of sentences. Tens of thousands of undergraduate students enroll in creative writing classes every semester, and the database maintained by Poets & Writers currently lists two hundred and three graduate programs offering the MFA degree. Studies of the institutionalization of creative writing by scholars like D.G. Myers and Mark McGurl claim that the examination of technique is a secondary function of a writing program whose real purpose is to coach students through the labor of self-expression, but the widespread fascination with the minutiae of Munro’s craft would seem to indicate otherwise. The joyful reaction to the news of Munro’s Nobel among American writers and readers of literary fiction has to have something to do with the fact that we understand, or think we understand, how she does what she does. One doesn’t have to look far for an analogy: I like listening to Gil Shaham play the violin, but I’d probably like it even better if I knew a fingerboard from a pegbox. Reading Munro, noticing an abrupt but somehow perfect ending to a scene, an Austenian moment of indirect discourse, we must be getting smarter even as we enjoy ourselves.
As a teacher, I went back again and again to her stories, gaining through rereading an appreciation of the subtler aspects of her craft. Joan Silber, author of As Long As It Takes: The Art of Time in Fiction, praises Munro for her use of what she calls “Switchback Time,” “a zigzag movement back and forth among time frames…us[ing] the shifts in an order that doesn’t give dominance to a particular time.” Often we move back and forth between the end and beginning of an affair, a marriage, a life, until the two narratives come to possess equal weight and interest. Here Munro transgresses what I teach to my classes as a rule — that the present time of a story must be more interesting and carry more weight than the flashbacks — but does it in a way that can be explained and discussed, perhaps even imitated by anyone who has the courage to try it. I kept on studying her stories, and trying to share their unique brilliance with my students, even after I came to suspect that the author herself might not entirely approve of my efforts to interpret and explain her methods. The story “Differently” opens with a scene of an unsuccessful lesson on the craft of fiction:
Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.
Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out.
Perhaps it is simplistic or wrong-headed of me to read this passage as Munro’s comment on the university study of creative writing. She would know better than anyone that a story must be a complete thing in itself, that one requiring an appendix has bigger problems than a lack of authenticity. And yet it is worth noting that she is not — like other writers beloved by the workshop; like Tim O’Brien, for instance, or Richard Ford — a staple of university reading series. She has never, as far as I have ever heard, taught in an MFA program as a visiting writer, or even flown in for a few days of readings and craft talks. Her use of what Silber calls Switchback Time could be seen as an infinitely more sophisticated version of Georgia’s appendix, an effort to put more into a short story than the form is supposed to be able to support. I suspect — though I may well be projecting — that Munro would find in the university-trained fiction writer’s obsession with craft in general and with her work in particular a kind of well-meaning naïveté, a dotty insistence on missing the point.
As I left my twenties and entered my second decade as a teacher of creative writing, I found that I could now answer my MFA classmate’s question in perfect sincerity: I loved Alice Munro. I loved her not because of Switchback Time or her ear-perfect dialogue, but because her stories had become part of my inner landscape. Like my favorite scenes in Austen and George Eliot, Cheever and Flannery O’Connor, these stories hold in retrospect the intensity of my own memories. If writing a poem is like living twice, reading Munro is like living over and over again, lifetime upon lifetime in the space of a single story. My deepened appreciation for her work may also have something to do with what I’ve experienced in what I think of in my non-literary life — marriage, motherhood, the loss of family and friends. I have an idea that she may be, like George Eliot, a writer better understood on the far side of thirty.
In the days since the announcement of her Nobel, as I walk around replaying scenes from Munro’s stories in my head, I’ve found that the passages that come back to me are not the teachable moments I’d point to in a class discussion, but snippets whose power and brilliance seems to elude my efforts at explication. The scene in “Save the Reaper” when a woman named Eve foolishly leads her young grandchildren into a nightmarishly strange house in an Ontario cornfield; or the climactic moment in “The Beggar Maid,” when Rose sees her ex-husband Patrick at an airport many years after their divorce and he greets her by making an ugly, hateful face. I could and did recite the final lines of that scene — Oh, Patrick could. Patrick could — but I couldn’t explain to anyone, least of all myself, why they lingered with me so powerfully. Those passages aren’t how I teach writing, but they’re why I wanted to be a writer, and a teacher, in the first place.
Years ago a friend of mine cautioned me to not to teach my classes like the Chris Farley Show, referencing the nineties-era SNL skit where Farley ineptly interviews artists that clearly impress him too much. Instead of asking Paul McCartney or Martin Scorcese questions about their careers, Farley summarizes important moments in their work and then tells them they were “pretty awesome.” Implicit in my friend’s advice was the idea that it was insufficient to simply praise a piece of writing for being unbelievably good. It wasn’t critical. It didn’t actually teach anybody anything. I believe he was right, for the most part, but when I think about the happiness that I and so many of my writer friends seemed to feel at the news of the Nobel, I wonder if what I need in my life is a little less craft and a little more Chris Farley. Instead of talking about how Munro does what she does, wouldn’t it feel good to just let the stories happen? Remember that one part in “The Albanian Virgin,” and “Runaway,” and “Friend of My Youth”? That was really great. That was pretty awesome.
Modiano, 69, is best known for his Prix Goncourt-winning 1978 novel Missing Person. Publisher David R Godine calls it “a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafes, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog. On another level, it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self.” While Modiano’s novels have been published in English translations over the years, including by major publishers like Knopf, only a handful of his 25 or so books are currently in print in the U.S. These include Honeymoon and Catherine Certitude, a children’s book, illustrated by Sempe. Yale will be releasing a new edition next year that collects three Modiano novellas under the title Suspended Sentences. Update: Yale has announced that it will now publish the book in November 2014.
This strikes me as another example of mediocrity rising to the top. I watched the live broadcast of the announcement this morning, and thought that the silence of the Swedish crowd at the announcement spoke volumes. As I tried to ague the other day on another posting, the Swedish Academy’s track record over the past one hundred plus years has not been that good. Occasionally they get it right, but often they have momentarily plucked someone from obscurity–and then a few years later, they’ve become obscure and unread again. I am certainly chortling in my morning coffee today, and plan to go back to reading my non-Nobel laureates–Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Tolstoy, Ford Maddox Ford.
… and Joyce and, apparantly, Phillip Roth. I can’t comment on a writer I haven’t read, but the transparent agenda in the selections is frustrating. You almost expect them t announce the winner as “not an American!” to rapturous applause.
What a joke. You want to give it to a Frenchman then give it to Houellebecq.
Maybe the above responders, to clarify their feelings, could share with the readers of this thread, brief comments on the Modiano’s they’ve read. That would be helpful.
I believe Jane is implying that people are making negative comments about the Nobel choice without having read the author’s works. But, even more importantly, if he was awarded the Nobel, then why isn’t he better known to us? Being a writer from a foreign country does not preclude one from becoming recognized.
He is 69, actually.
Thanks Catherine. We’ve fixed.
To Jack M
In your comment, what “us” do you mean? English only readers? To check his “recognition” in non-English reading countries look at the listings for Modiano on Amazon.es, Amazon de, Amazon it. to get an idea of what’s available to readers in those languages. Once again, because of the dearth of foreign books translated into English, English only readers are missing out on a lot, as this Nobel shows.
“You almost expect them t announce the winner as “not an American!” to rapturous applause.”
Good God. USA isn’t the center of the literary universe, you know.
“This strikes me as another example of mediocrity rising to the top.”
This strikes me as another example of a non-American rising to the top.
“often they have momentarily plucked someone from obscurity–and then a few years later, they’ve become obscure and unread again.”
At least be honest about it: Often they’ve momentarily plucked someone I’ve never heard of, and then a few years later, I still haven’t read them, which is all the proof you need that the Nobel sucks.
The main thing to be learned from the Nobel these days is that there is a serious lack of translated fiction in this country.
In my thirty years of reading lit crit I have never heard Modiano mentioned ONCE as a writer of note. He seems to me nothing more than a journeymen cranking out mediocre middlebrow fiction. I find this choice perplexing and smacking of the basest form of cronyism.
If this means anything to the writers above, I’ve just listened to an interview with Patrick Modiano on France 2. He doesn’t know why he won the Nobel either.
I’ve never heard of Modiano. Therefore, he sucks and the Nobel is a conspiracy.
Philip Roth should get the Nobel every year.
Patrick Modiano is a writer of noir, genre fiction, the detective story. There is nothing wrong with that, it just hardly seems like the tradition that the Nobel would honor, even if, as Peter Englund, the Nobel secretary states, it is done with a twist. Of course, this is not the first controversial choice the Swedish Academy has made. As I said in my first post, I watched the webcast of the announcement. Usually, the crowd makes some kind of reaction, especially if they agree. Today, it was total silence. I don’t think this choice is sitting too well.
Now, if you look back at the long list of winners, you really will see a lot of names that you will not recognize–Mommsen, Rolland, Pontoppidan, etc. They have made some great choices–Faulkner became a laureate when he was pretty much unknown and all his books out of print. A very inspired choice. Patrick White is one of the greatest writers of the century–unfortunately, most of his books are out of print at the moment. Nadine Gordimer, Coetzee, Naipaul, Mario Vargas Llosa, several others who were inspired choices, very deserving. In my mind, a writer of noir and detective stories is hardly Nobel worthy. However, it is not my decision, nor is it my money–they can choose to spend/waste how they want. Just don’t expect me to respect that decision. If they wanted to recognize a Francophone writer, great–Assia Djebar probably would have been a better choice. Or some of the Francophone writers of Sub-Saharan Africa. I’m sure that there are great Francophone writers in Quebec. I’m just saying that there were other, better choices.
As an aside, and now that I’m thinking about it, Graham Greene wrote some similar books. He called them “entertainments.” He was not a Nobel laureate either. It is rather curious that Modiano is recognized for his genre writings and Greene was not. I do rather have to agree, though, that the Nobel does seem to becoming rather a joke when you get laureates like this.
Jane, I agree that novels that have not been translated into English lack the exposure they deserve, but that is not my point. By “us” I mean any reader who is able to read the author’s works, regardless of the language.
I read many novels in English translation, and am thus familiar with many foreign author’s works. My point was simply that, as an avid reader, I should at least have a passing familiarity with a Nobel Prize winner. It’s just my opinion.
To me the Nobel has always been – and I know this is going to sound rather crass – kind of like a Hall of Fame induction for a specific writer, a way of saying, “Because of your work you have now entered the Pantheon.” All I will say is that there are plenty of writers alive today – men and women, American, Asian, African, European, Middle Eastern – who should be given this highest of honors, and to give it to someone like Modiano lessens the award, makes it almost irrelevant, on par with any of the other countless literary awards that are given out every year. Modiano is a fine writer, but I didn’t think that is what the Nobel was for, for fine writing. I thought it was for transcendent writing. If there is anyone out there – besides the dullards who currently make up the Nobel committee – who thinks Modiano is a transcendent writer, please, explain to me why he is.
I have never read Modiano, or even heard of him. Tranströmer, Müller, Le Clézio, Pamuk, Jelinek, Kertész, and Xingjian, on the other hand, are names we are all well acquainted with thereby proving this an unusual and outrageous selection. What a shocking deviation from history.
Jane Stivarius: Maybe the above responders, to clarify their feelings, could share with the readers of this thread, brief comments on the Modiano’s they’ve read. That would be helpful…..
As one of the three people who posted before you, I assume you are including me in your remark. In my case, I clearly stated I couldn’t comment on a writer I haven’t read. I know nothing about him. I will read him, but I was commenting on the clear agenda… which leads to my next response…
Ed Bast: USA isn’t the center of the literary universe, you know.
I wasn’t aware that I claimed it was.
What I am claiming is that the choices made by the Swedish Academy seem increasing driven by an agenda, not by literary quality. Roth – and I assume you’re not arguing he’s not worthy, because that’s another story – loses out on two counts. They don’t want to give “insular, inward looking” US writers the award (never mind that they give it to insular, inward looking writers from other countries and the the criticism is wrong in the first place) and the fashinable, innacurate claim about his misogyny.
That aside, there seems to be a determined “not an American” school within the Swedish Academy and I find that frustrating.
@Tony M
“What I am claiming is that the choices made by the Swedish Academy seem increasing driven by an agenda, not by literary quality.”
The Swedish Academy does have an agenda that goes beyond “literary quality”. Their agenda is to award the author who has produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. In any case, the US still has the second most Nobel laureates in literature (11), and yet you don’t hear anyone whining about China (2) or Japan (2) or India (1) or Mexico (1) being discriminated against, let alone literature producing countries that have never been recognized.
This is because Americans think they are the greatest, as Engdahl, who called the US “isolated” and “insular” in the first place (not their writers–the country itself), well knows:
“Everyone reacted as if I’d said that the major American writers had no chance of winning the Nobel. I said nothing of the sort; I didn’t say that there were no worthy American writers. I said that American literary life, American criticism and teaching were limited today by too narrow an access to world literature, because the number of translations and their reach in the US is feeble. Everything is focused around their [US] writers and their language, like a hall of mirrors which reflects a perpetual, infinite image of America.”
Don’t you think these big awards are mostly popularity contests for the literati — with just about as much meaning? Sometimes, the teeny committee of subjective judges makes inspired choices, as several posters mentioned above, and sometimes — not so much.
Writers must ache to win — the increased readership, sales and, hey, cash money are very juicy — but I would argue that the choice rarely reflects Ulimate Quality (is there such a thing?) Can one book out of thousands really represent THE BEST in any given year? Is there a Socratic Ideal of the novel ? God, I hope not! But if there is I’m voting Austen all the way. Which will enrage the Houllebecqians who will piss off the Tolstoyans, not to mention the DFWers and on and on.
This stuff is fun to argue about ( love the discussions here) but prizes don’t really tell us anything beyond the opinions of a few people in a given year.
What timble said.
“This is because Americans think they are the greatest”
For proof of this, re-read this comment section.
Authors that should have won the Nobel Prize, based off the following books (no order):
– Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater
– Antonio Lobo Antunes, the Inquisitors’ Manual
– Procopius, The Secret History
– Cormac McCarthy, The Secret
– Every Swede Ever
– Thomas Mann, I Fucking Love Joe Biden’s Bold-Ass Attitude
– A Monkey Wrench, Adjustable PVC Pipe
– James Joyce, Whatever
– Decades Worth of Bad Decisions, the Bees-in-Hives
– Thomas Pynchon, Everything
– Thomas Bernhard, He’s Dead
– People named Thomas
– Gwyneth Palrow
– The Guy Who Wrote “Chinatown”
– I forget what we were talking about
– Bruce Springsteen
– Philip Roth, “Everybody Dance Now”
You left out Darude – Sandstorm.
Oh, trust me timble. I made a very conscious decision TO leave it out. And I’m not afraid to admit that shit.
I think the truest comments in this intriguing conversation came from Ed Bast and Priskill. Said the former, “The main thing to be learned about the Nobel these days is that there is a serious lack of translated fiction in this country.” I learned about this year’s prize on Thursday morning when I looked through the window of a bookstore in Cologne, Germany and saw the words “Literaturnobelpreis – Patrick Modiano” above a display of a dozen of his books in their French original and in German translation (none in English). Inside the store I asked a clerk if she had read Modiano, and she said (in English), “Oh yes, he’s quite good.” I confessed that even though I’m a writer I had never heard of the man. Back out on the street I fell into conversation with a fellow customer, who recommended Modiano’s first novel, “La Place de l’Etoile.” Only later did I learn that it’s nearly impossible to find copies of Modiano’s books translated into English.
Said Priskill,”Prizes don’t really tell us anything beyond the opinions of a few people in a given year.” Amen! So let’s all get rid of the fantasy that a Nobel (or an Oscar or a Tony) is objective, accurate and fair recognition of artistic achievement. If prizes sell books (or movie or theater tickets), they’ve accomplished something worthwhile. Here’s hoping Modiano’s Nobel spurs American publishers to translate more of the world’s great literature into English so that we American readers don’t remain where we so often are – in the dark.
Bill
You seem to be suggesting there is a robust literary culture outside of the US…what a concept!
Also, it seems that people who have actually read Modiano have a much kinder opinion of his work than the folks around here who haven’t. interesting. Was the clerk somehow unaware that Modiano writes “genre fiction”?
The only reasonable American response to Modiano’s deserved win is the following:
http://flavorwire.com/481571/trolled-by-the-swedish-academy-patrick-modianos-nobel-prize-in-literature
Enjoy your mediocre pulp and have a nice day.
What Bill Morris Said.
As for the claims Modiano writes detective fiction, my impression is that he uses elements of detective fiction but that his books lack the payoffs that fans of the genre want — a solution to a crime, tidy resolution, etc. I’m eager to read a couple of his novels, in part to find out if that’s correct.
I don’t know anything about Modiano and haven’t read any of his work, so I have no opinion on this selection.
I do hope the committee eventually comes around and gives Roth and McCarthy their due. I think we’ll be lucky if even one of them gets honored.
“I don’t want to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” –Groucho Marx
Everytime I see an author’s work is a “meditation on the nature of THE SELF”, all I hear is, “This writer has nothing to say about anything that actually matters.” Can we please stop with these navel-gazing “examinations” of THE SELF? Please?
Like I’ve said before, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman would be fantastic, daring, and altogether worthy choices among English language writers. If only the Academy knew a thing about literature outside the realist tradition. Indeed, they have stepped outside on occasion, but those picks have typically been the exceptions.
I’m sure the people of France last year were like, “Alice Munro, right! She is aces, I love her!”
Ask 100 literature experts from 100 countries to name their choice for next Nobel Prize winner and you might get 100 different answers. There’s no science to it.
Even if one suggested that only 25 countries contribute significantly to the world canon, that would still mean Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy are in a queue with no fewer than 48 other equally deserving candidates – a 2% chance of winning. If 25 is ludicrously low – and it surely is – then the queue and the odds are that much longer.
On top of that, what percentage of qualified American assessors would agree that Roth and McCarthy are America’s living best? Not a plurality I’m guessing. Maybe not even 10%. The Nobel Prize needs not be especially political – it needs only to be routinely political – to yield unpredictable results.
If you don’t like (or haven’t even read) many/most of the prior choices, then why would you want your favored writer to be placed among them? Why would you think it prestigious if you don’t even like the stuff? It’s like hating sports, never watching a game all season, and then complaining about who wins MVP.
Keep in mind the effect a translator can have on our reading. I don’t know Modiano, but I’ve read that his style is sometimes poetic and difficult to translate, so until more English translations are available (if we don’t read French), our view of his work might be wrong.
Murakami wrote an interesting piece on this — the preface to his rendition of “The Great Gatsby” — in which he wonders if the book’s unpopularity in Japan is due to its prosaic translations. With novels like “Gatsby,” the music of the language is key.
Simply because you haven’t heard of Mondiano doesn’t imply he isn’t a writer worthy of international reknown. It’s pretty provincial to assume that simply because somebody isn’t famous in the U.S. means he doesn’t deserve the Nobel.
Alain Mabanckou isn’t so well-known in the U.S, and not all of his oeuvre has been translated into English. I find him to be one of the most vital around.
Really, there are so many writers out there in the whole wide world. If you cannot read in foreign languages, try to seek out more works in translation.