Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid

Adjective heaps & just-strange-enough similes

“It was as if he had come up to her in a crowd carrying a large, simple, dazzling object — a huge egg, maybe, of solid silver, something of doubtful use and punishing weight — and was offering it to her, in fact thrusting it at her, begging her to take some of the weight of it off him.”

I feel about Alice Munro the way that many rock critics feel about Bob Dylan. Which is to say that I could happily extol her greatness until the living room cleared out and I was left addressing houseplants and sleeping pets.

This sentence comes from “The Beggar Maid,” which might be her single best story (but don’t make me choose). It’s about a college-age woman named Rose (she’s the Munro stand-in in the story) who’s being romantically pursued by a clumsy, earnest, wealthy older student named Patrick. Patrick has been joylessly, relentlessly courting Rose, and she finds herself — with considerable ambivalence — going along with it. It isn’t, Rose says, the amount of money that Patrick offers that makes him impossible to turn away — it’s the amount of love.

And Munro decides to compare this overwhelming quantity of love to… a huge, cumbersome, silver egg! What? Have you ever come across such an object? Has anyone? And yet this image has, for me anyway, the perfection of images in dreams. It isn’t (in the way of an Updike metaphor) so elaborately perfect that you briefly forget the story in order to pull out your roll of Gold Star stickers; it isn’t (in the way of a Murakami metaphor) so bizarrely inapt that you wonder if you’re dealing with a mistranslation. It’s strangeness is precisely the level of strangeness that we find in our own most important and hard-to-articulate thoughts; we aren’t seated in an auditorium, listening to a reading by a Nobel laureate (!) — we’re on the phone late at night with our oldest friend. 

One of the ways Munro manages this impression-of-intimacy/authenticity is by working out the sentence, revising it, before our eyes (“a huge egg, maybe,” “in fact thrusting it at her”). This is one her best and most frequently deployed tricks — her writing is forever stopping to correct itself, to clarify something, to point out its own shortcomings or small dishonesties. 

And let's look, finally, at the language itself. Large, simple, dazzling, huge, solid, punishing. One of the most standard Strunk-and-White-ish bits of writing advice is to go through your prose and cross out the adjectives. Has there ever been a writer who more gleefully or skillfully neglects this (usually wise!) advice than Munro? She uses adjectives the way Alison Roman uses herbs, or the way the Beach Boys use chords; she piles them on top of each other, layers them, combines them to make new super-adjectives, adjectival color-wheels.

Munro’s stories traffic in heartbreak, death, and every manner of forbidden, painful, and shameful thought — and yet there’s no writer I know of whose author photos, taken over decades, contain wider or more genuine-seeming smiles. There are no doubt all sorts of cultural and characterological explanations for this, but I like to think that one reason for the smiles is because it is a genuine joy to write the way that she does. Every pain — even the pain of entering into what will turn out to be a miserable, oppressive marriage — can be partially redeemed, can even be turned (however briefly) into a source of pleasure, by being captured in imagery of sufficient freshness and precision. Good lord, that was an awful time. And you know what else it was like?  An enormous, silver egg.