Free Radicals by Alice Munro

This week was a turbulent one in more than respect: My bedroom was painted and last weekend protests turned violent in town (not entirely unexpected and resulting in a media-blackout and a state of emergency). I spent the last couple of days either at work, or at home helping with the painting, cleaning the mess afterwards or on the internet searching for info that is a bit more trustworthy than what official and pro-government tv-channels serve us (which is getting more ridiculous day by day). All this has left me with little time to read, but I did manage to read a bit at least – one short story to be precise.

Alice Munro is one of the authors I had never heard about before I started reading bookblogs. As I kept coming across her name, I became more and more interested in her and added her to my list of authors I wanted to read. Then, a couple of weeks ago, The New Yorker published one of her short stories online, Free Radicals. I completely missed this, even though I have The New Yorker’s fiction feed in my feedreader. I must have overlooked Munro’s story and just marked it ‘read’. Fortunately Erin came to the rescue by mentioning the link in one of her posts. I printed the story and took it home, where as usual, it disappeared in the pile of TBR-prints. I picked it up again last week. Short verdict: I loved it and am ready for some more Alice Munro!

The main character is Nita, whose husband Rich suddenly died a few months before and who is now trying to deal with this. I found Nita a likable character, with her directness and her refusal to adjust to ‘the way other people thought she ought to be’. I love how the following paragraphs sort of matter-of-factly describe Rich’s death and how this at the same time says at least as much about Nita’s own character:

Rich had told her that he was going to the village, to the hardware store. It was around ten o’clock in the morning, and he had just started to paint the railing of the deck. That is, he’d been scraping it to prepare for the painting, and the old scraper had come apart in his hand.

She hadn’t had time to wonder about his being late. He’d died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood in front of the hardware store offering a discount on lawnmowers. He hadn’t even managed to get into the store. He’d been eighty-one years old and in fine health, aside from some deafness in his right ear. His doctor had checked him over only the week before. Nita was to learn that the recent checkup, the clean bill of health, cropped up in a surprising number of the sudden-death stories she was now presented with. “You’d almost think that such visits ought to be avoided,” she’d said.

She should have spoken like this only to her close and fellow bad-mouthing friends, Virgie and Carol, women around her own age, which was sixty-two. Her younger friends found this sort of talk unseemly and evasive.

At the same time Nita has to deal with her own cancer, which “was at present in remission – whatever that actually meant. It did not mean gone. Not for good, anyway.” With her cancer, Nita was the one who was ’supposed ‘ to die first, not Rich who had been in very good health even though he was twenty years older than she was. When Nita had been diagnosed with cancer about a year before, she and Rich had inquired about funerals, but as Nita says after his death: “How was I to know he’d steal my thunder?”

Nita mostly deals with Rich’ death by keeping to herself, avoiding other people and isolating herself in their home which lies secluded some way outside a village. She spends her days not doing a lot, just eating, sleeping and thinking. And missing Rich:

She thought carefully, every morning when she first took her seat, of the places where Rich was not. He was not in the smaller bathroom, where his shaving things still were, along with the prescription pills for various troublesome but not serious ailments which he’d refused to throw out. Nor was he in the bedroom, which she had just tidied and left. Not in the larger bathroom, which he had entered only to take tub baths. Or in the kitchen, which had become mostly his domain in the last year. He was of course not out on the half-scraped deck, ready to peer jokingly in the window – through which she might, in earlier days, have pretended to be alarmed at the sight of a peeping tom.

Or in the study. That was where, of all places, his absence had to be most often verified. At first, she had found it necessary to go to the door and open it and stand there, surveying the piles of paper, the moribund computer, the overflowing files, the books lying open or face down, as well as crowded on the shelves. Now she could manage just by picturing these things.

Nita lives quietly like this, until one morning, a young man suddenly shows up on Nita’s doorstep. He says he has come to look at her fuse box, which soon turns out to be an excuse. But what does he want from her? A story with twists and turns follows, mainly in the form of a dialogue between Nita and the man.

What we find out about this man, we find out through what he tells Nita (and us). The way he speaks, uses words are what create this character. Just like, in fact, what Nita thinks and says are essential in painting her character. We don’t learn much about these two people through descriptions of what they do or look like, but we do get to know them through what they say and, in Nita’s case, think.

I liked Munro’s writing. At first it seems very accessible, very easy to read (which it is, actually), but that is deceiving: I found myself taking up the story and rereading parts of it and each time finding new details that made the story and the characters richer. In the end, it was really the details that made this story for me. I will certainly be looking for more Alice Munro in the future; I’d love to read more of her works. If anyone can recommend where to start, please leave a comment.

I will end this review with one more quote, one that made me smile. You see, Nita was a reader:

She had always been such a reader – that was one reason, Rich had said, that she was the right woman for him; she could sit and let him alone[...]. She hadn’t been just a once-through reader, either. “The Brothers Karamazov”,”The Mill on the Floss”, “The Wings of the Dove”, “The Magic Mountain”, over and over. She would pick one up, planning to read that one special passage, and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction, too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She once might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape.