'Hateship' to 'friendship' to 'courtship'
by Zak Salih / senior writer
Alice Munro's latest collection of short stories, "Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" is wonderful to
read.
For a first-time reader of Munro (which many of you reading this
article might be), her stories depict the natural ebbs and flows
of life. There are no earth-shattering incidents or violent lines
of prose to hook the reader in; many of the stories in "Hateship"
begin smoothly, as if the reader just has waded into the current
of a river. The stories are about everyday life but more importantly,
as the title implies, the relationships between people in love.
The stories in this collection are littered with love affairs,
love obsessions, love-hate relationships, kisses both chaste and
deep. The love Munro writes about in "Hateship" is a love
of both happenstance and destiny. Take, for instance, the title
story, in which a teenage girl unearths correspondence between her
father and the housekeeper and orchestrates love letters in her
father's name to the point that the housekeeper, Johanna, abandons
her old life for dreams of love. For the juvenile girls in this
story, like two fates whose tool is a typewriter, love is a game.
This kind of pain is not uncommon in the love stories littered
throughout the book. Keep in mind, the love stories I describe are
not bodice-rippers or rivers-of-tears; the affairs and fleeting,
extramarital kisses between Munro's characters are the encounters
that real life is made of. It is painful to read pockets of emotion
in which the characters lose themselves for mere moments, be it
the lingering al fresco kiss of "Floating Bridge" or the
speedy one-night-stand of "What Is Remembered."
Munro's writing style is a wonderful delight to read. Descriptive
passages are savored like a fine wine not because they reveal universal
truths but merely because they ring true with universal experiences.
In Munro's world, which may be the world we all live in, destiny
intertwines with randomness. Death takes on an organized feel, as
in the opening to "Post and Beam" where a character's
mother estimates the time of her death. Organized for the deceased,
perhaps, but not so for those left living, who are caught in a flurry
of emotional panic and release. Nina's desperate search for
a suicide note left by her husband in the story "Comfort"
provides a standout moment in the standout story of the collection.
I can say with a booming voice that "Hateship, Friendship,
Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" is an intriguing and sincere
collection of emotions, a collage of subtle, subdued, yet overwhelmingly
powerful pieces of short fiction.
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