The bear

The title of the final story comes from an old folk song. It goes, “The bear came over the mountain to see what he could see. And all that he could see was the other side of the mountain.”

How do you think this relates to the story?

Marriage and escape

Mr. Vorguilla is probably the most despicable husband we've seen in this collection of terrible husbands. And Munro gives us another heartening vision of marriage:

"Well, of course he was wrong. Men are not normal, Chrissy. That's one thing you'll learn if you ever get married."

And again we have a wife running away, this time literally, from the marriage. What's different about Queenie? When she's talking to Chrissy, she seems resigned to her situation, so why doesn't she continue to suffer quietly like the other wives?

What is not remembered

Meriel tries to remember everything about her romantic encounter --"and by 'remember' she meant experience it in her mind, one more time -- then store it away forever." And for years to come, she continues to remember things about that day, each time being jolted by the memory. It's not until after her husband dies, however, that she remembers perhaps the most important moment: The doctor refused to kiss her goodbye. And she realizes that if she had remembered it earlier, she might not have stayed with her husband. She might have left her marriage in response to her lover's denial even though nothing else had made her do so, not even the fact that she didn't seem to particularly like her husband. What do you make of that?

Young husbands

This was a remarkable paragraph, I thought, that seemed to sum up the predicament of marriage that Munro writes about.

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back -- during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children -- into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there.

This, in particular, may be what drives most of Munro's men: How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. The feeling of loss of control at work makes the men compensate as ogres at home.

Remembering

"What Is Remembered" gives us the first real sexual infidelity in this story collection. Rather than a wife who pines her whole married life for something exciting to happen, fantasizing about some imagined love affair, we have Meriel, who has her moment of excitement and then spends her whole married life clutching the memory like a life preserver. Do you think she's happier for having taken that plunge than the wives who only long for it?

timelessness

Something about the description in the first story (the descriptions of dress, maybe, or the use of trains) made me visualize that the setting was supposed to be at least a few decades ago, maybe the '60s. As I keep reading, I have that sense of timelessness, that these stories could be set almost any time since the early 20th century. Do you visualize the stories in terms of today or otherwise?

Bargains

"Post and Beam" is another story with a tagged on disclaimer.

It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.

Lorna had tried to make a bargain with God, that if Polly was still alive when they returned home, Lorna would do whatever she had to do. She comes to realize later that "the bargain was already in force." Her promise was to accept that her life wouldn't change. The children would grow up and "she and Brendan would grow older and then old."

The Publisher's Weekly review that I quoted when I picked this book said, "Munro has few peers in her understanding of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay."

What's your take on this idea of bargaining with life?

Wives

"Post and Beam" gives us another example of a prison of a marriage.

Think about the marriages in "Floating Bridge" and "Comfort."

In "Nettles," the narrator talks about the enchantment she feels in leaving behind her marriage and its domesticity. In "Family Furnishings," Alfrida says that the narrator will soon be a married woman: By her tone, this could mean either 'I have to allow that you're grown up now' or 'Pretty soon you'll have to toe the line.'

And now we have Lorna, who's married to Brendan (another older man, another academic), but who has odd, seemingly platonic fantasies about one of his former students. I loved this paragraph:

She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain extent, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time.

There's no high drama here, or in any of the stories, really. There's no domestic violence, there's not even infidelity that we know about. But these women are unhappy, unfulfilled and desperate to escape.

Death

I really appreciated how Munro juxtaposed the experiences of death in this story as a way of highlighting the difference between childhood and adulthood. The prime difference is how we understand mortality. When you are a kid, you generally have little grasp of death, or the brevity of life, or the fragility of life. You may have witnessed death; but you don't really accept your own mortality until you get older. Death is something you can play at, something that's romantic, like soldiers dying on a battlefield with women wailing lamentations, and it's reversible. When you are tired of being dead, you get back up and rejoin the game. And then of course when you grow up, you discover that death is not a game, it's not romantic, and it's not reversible. It's ugly and haunting and tragic and it's with you forever and ever — until you yourself die. It's something that — even with all the power and richness of a young imagination — cannot really be imagined by the young.

And I think we are to understand that as a blessing of youth. And it seems like some of the "awakenings" people have in Munro's stories have something to do with feeling blessed again, even for a moment.

The unthinkable

If you think this collection contains some sad, screwed-up relationships, read "Dimension," the story I linked to in an earlier post.

"Nettles" has a dad who killed his child accidentally. "Dimension" has a dad who did it on purpose. There are really interesting questions in both about survival and pain and self-worth in the aftermath of an unthinkable act.

Love

I think that Mike's tragedy with his child is a bigger impediment to an adult relationship with the narrator than his being married. Did you have that feeling?

Theirs — this broke my heart — is described as a "love that was not usable, that knew its place."

Do you think that would be true if they had just met, if they didn't have the weight of their shared childhood between them?

Oh wait

What do you make of the fact that the "nettles" they were in were not really nettles but the less common joe-pye weed? The narrator ends the story with this "correction."

And another kiss!

What did you make of this one in the "nettles"?

The narrator describes the kiss as more a matter of survival than their "bodies' inclinations."

And yet she has been desiring him heatedly before then: a pounding heart, lust with "shooting pains."

Nettles

I think my favorite image from this story is of the kids washing the feet of Mike and the narrator after their golf-course outing.

Claire especially was delighted with the sight of our naked, foolish, adult feet.

It's fantastic because it's an image of humility and also because it harkens back to their own childhood when their friendship began. Only now they are the adults in someone else's Kid World.

The narrator says of her own childhood: It doesn't seem likely that such account would be taken of children's feelings, in those days. They were our business, to suffer or suppress.

It seems, though, that the same is true in adulthood, isn't it? Doesn't the narrator find that her feelings are still her business to suffer or suppress?

Had sex. Have sex with.

He was an athletic and inventive partner and in a physical sense, not unaware of her. Not inconsiderate. But he was on guard against anything that verged on sentimentality, and from his point of view, much did. She came to be very sensitive to this distaste, almost to share it.

What does it mean to be "on guard against anything that verged on sentimentality?" What is sentimentality with regards to sex?

And how sad is it that she came "almost to share" his distaste of sentimentality? That sentence speaks volumes about a woman who gave up too much in order to make her husband comfortable.

Kisses

Are there parallels between Nina's kiss and Jinny's?

Comfort

What are your thoughts on the title of this story? What "comfort" is she talking about?

Domestic details

I love how Munro, in "Family Furnishings" and other stories, captures the spirit of being a young person immersed in and on the cusp of understanding the "adult world," particularly one's own family dynamics.

On dinner talk: There was hardly any idea of a general conversation, and in fact there was a feeling that conversation that passed beyond certain understood limits might be a disruption, a showing-off.

It was improper somehow to pay attention to anything that was not close at hand. (talking about books instead of the weather, for instance).

Alfrida not only accepted second helpings, she asked for them.

...she (Alfrida) was really there to talk, and make other people talk, and anything you wanted to talk about — almost anything — would be fine.

The aunts' husbands had opinions too, but theirs were brief and unvaried and expressed an everlasting distrust of all public figures and particularly all foreigners...

...and the aunts themselves seemed fairly proud of how much they didn't know or didn't have to pay attention to.

How like them, I thought, to toss aside Alfrida's wit and style and turn her teeth into a sorry problem.

flourishing under the banner of my own personality

And when Alfrida makes fun of the book in their house (and the narrator pretends to be less smart and bookish than she really is): That was the kind of lie that I hoped never to have to tell again, the contempt I hoped never to have to show, about the things that really mattered to me. And in order not to have to do that, I would pretty well have to stay clear of the people I used to know.

...usually I was affronted when people had anything to say about my appearance. Particularly when it was somebody like Alfrida — somebody who had lost all importance in my life. I believed that such people had no right to be looking at me, or forming any opinions about me, let alone stating them.

There too you could come upon a shabby male hideaway with its furtive yet insistent odors, its shamefaced but stubborn look of contradicting the female domain.

he did seem to carry around a history of defeat

The reason that I had nothing to say was not that I was rude or bored ... but that I did not understand that I should ask questions.

And in this description of her fiance, you can almost tell that their marriage will not last forever, that she will outgrow him: He admired opera and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy — for the squalor of tragedy — in ordinary life.

the wearing out of attachments, that I understood so well in my own life but did not expect to happen in the lives of older people.

Whose family?

Did it seem to any of you that “Family Furnishings” might be completely non-fiction?

Aunt Alfrida

From a review in Atlantic Monthly:

There is a long line of idolized women in Munro's stories, usually independent and childless, living emotionally extravagant, artistic lives, admired by shyer, more cautious, and often younger women. The very real suffering and squalor endured by these idols is sometimes glimpsed in flashes, with the troubling suggestion that their more colorful ways may not all have been a matter of choice. But usually the younger woman is too much in the thick of her own life to pause long to consider the implications of these hardships for herself or her future.

"Family Furnishings" is apparently at least partially autobiographical. What did you think of the narrator's reactions to Alfrida as an adult? Did you find her callous for using Alfrida's private recollections as material for her writing, or for being annoyed when she found out Alfrida had been upset by it?

Escape

With "Family Furnishings," I began to notice Munro's recurring theme of escape.

In "Hateship," we have Johanna fleeing her dreary, loveless life for the possibility of companionship. In "Floating Bridge," Jinny had tried to escape before but never got farther than the bus stop; she eventually finds the release she had been seeking in a kiss with a teenage boy. And in "Family Furnishings," the narrator escapes into urban anonymity, surrounded by "people I did not know and who did not know me. What a blessing."

"Such happiness, to be alone."

Any thoughts on this theme? Is it depressing that everyone wants to get away from their lives?

Furnishings

I think in "Family Furnishings," Munro is really talking about family baggage. And I think she pretty well described how a lot of people feel about their families and hometowns.

This line particularly resonated with me: "There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own."

Probably we've all felt that sense of danger at some point, of seeing our lives through our parents' eyes.

Kim's pick

Surprises

In "Floating Bridge," Munro once again explores life's twists, the idea that things often don't turn out the way you expected. I enjoyed her description of how even good news can throw you out of whack.

"It removed a certain low-grade freedom. A dull, protecting membrane that she had not even known was there had been pulled away and left her raw."

And then, when she is unexpectedly kissed by the young waiter, she feels ''a swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.''

She recognizes that this is perhaps just a momentary relief, but also that perhaps she has been given more time.

all for you, Sabitha

I not only thought Sabitha was a minor character, but belatedly, it occurs to me that she drives everything that happens in the first story. Edith's desire to first outwit and then please and entertain her friend is what sets the adults -- the pawns -- in motion.

Munro understands adolescent girls so well to make Edith loathing to impress Sabitha not because she is a good friend or an intellectual peer, but because Sabitha came back from Uncle Clark's with an impressive rack. "However they came, they seemed to indicate a completely unearned and unfair advantage."

And while Munro ends with Edith contemplating how in the world Johanna had triumphed in the machinations she set forth for her, I would bet it stung more that "she had taken the precaution of not speaking to Sabitha first, before Sabitha could not speak to her."

God, I love that line. Dear Edith -- the Sabithas are not worthy of your clever ruses!

More Munro

If you need something to read at work, Alice Munro has a story called "Dimension" in the New Yorker that's available online.

I'm reading it now while waiting for the press to run. It's great.

Edith

One thing, among many, that really intrigues me about Munro is that she acknowledges that life is about loose ends — and that's where a lot of suffering and angst come from, but also a lot of opportunity and growth. She doesn't try to artificially tie up all the loose ends at the end of a story — stories don't really end, do they, until we die? — but she does give a satisfying accounting of where characters are at that particular point and she usually intimates or outright states that even that point of view or situation will change. No emotion is the final one, to borrow from T.S. Eliot. A number of these stories span a major part of a girl's life, and we get a glimpse of her change in perspective from Point A to Point B, and often there's an implication that the hard-won wisdom of today will be even different down the road. In this first story, the action per se really concerns Johanna, but Johanna is this molded personality already — almost out of the author's (Munro's) hands in her determination, just as she defies the attempted manipulations of the girls who wish to be the author of her fate — so Munro narrates how Johanna plowed ahead into a new life, and it's lovely to behold, but I think what really concerns her are the girls who see themselves as puppetmasters, the girls who, like many writers vis-a-vis their characters, don't know who the hell they're dealing with. That's, I think, why in the end she comes back to Edith (one of many clever young women in this book whom Munro seems to identify with) and shows that she is stung by the knowledge of Johanna's fate, dismayed, insulted, but also bored and wondering why the "antics of her former self" should be connected with her present self. Who hasn't felt that way as a young person — a disconnect between the things you do and who you are? And Munro leaves us with an image of Edith's "real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her." This, I think, is an ironic nod to Johanna because that's exactly what she did, thanks in part to the girls' manipulations: She became the mistress of her own affairs, and got out of the town, surprising all the people who thought they knew her. At the end, it's like Munro is assessing Edith, with all her youthful dynamism and haughtiness and room for growth, and asking: Will you fare as well, my dear?

A simple question

Why did Ken marry Johanna?

What fate has in store

What were your thoughts on the ending of the story? I've read a couple of reviews that called the Latin translation bit "heavy-handed."

And what did you think of Edith and her reaction to the way her little game turned out?

Writing style

I adore Munro's language, the rather plain but artistic descriptions that paint such a clear image of the characters and setting. What were some of your favorite descriptions? Here are a few lines that I made note of:

Her teeth were all crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument.

It looked glamorous to her, like satin bedspreads and blond hair.

Since her own operation -- for gallstones -- she spoke knowledgeably and with a placid satisfaction about the afflictions of other people.

The sound of her activity would be like a net beneath him, heaven-sent, a bounty not to be questioned.

After Mrs. Willets her heart had been dry, and she had considered it might always be so. And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.

For your listening pleasure

Alice Munro reading from "Hateship"