Last weekend the NY Times ran an article in their Travel section entitled Alice Munro's Vancouver, an overview of Munro's stories set in Vancouver.
One of the interesting discoveries for me was that Munro first lived in Vancouver just a few blocks from where I live in the neighbourhood of Kitsilano. Kits was a very different place when she lived here, its progression from student hangout full of hippies and priviledged counter-culture revolutionaries to outdoor mall and lifestyle advertisement mirroring the movement of her generation from its coming-of-age experiments to its middle-aged mainstream complacency.
The other aspect of the article I really like is the idea of travelling through a city with a writer's views of that city in mind. Great idea. I love it. The problem though, is that Munro's Vancouver doesn't resemble today's Vancouver at all.
In Alice Munro's Vancouver nobody eats sushi. Nobody jogs along the seawall or browses Granville Street galleries or shops for organic herbs at the Granville Island market. Ms. Munro, the 74-year-old Canadian whom the novelist Jonathan Franzen dubbed "the best fiction writer now working in North America," set a handful of her marvelous short stories in the damp British Columbian metropolis, and the urban geography is so exact you can practically map the city off her fictions. But though the addresses match, the vibe is unrecognizable. Young but hopelessly uncool, lustful without being sexy, dowdy, white, blind to its own staggering beauty, Ms. Munro's Vancouver is an outpost where new wives blink through the rain and wonder when their real lives are going to begin.
The one portion of the article I take exception with is the assumption of Munro's greatness. I find her a tremendously divisive writer. People either love her stories or find them dull as dishwater. I am firmly in the second camp. I've tried to read a few of her books, as much for the broccoli approach as anything - it will be good for me. But I can't stand them. The praise others heap on her writing completely by-passes me. I don't get it. Sure she can set a scene, but I just can't stand her whiny characters or the fact that every story of hers that I've read feels like the same story retold.
I know it's not safe to say these things. The Canadian publishing industry is small and no one wants to rock the boat. But if we can't agree to disagree about these things we're just kindergarten writers and literature.
Posted by James Sherrett at June 19, 2006 07:59 AMNever liked her stuff either, to each their own I guess. But when someone hasn't lived in the city that they are using for a scene in over 20 years guess you just can't take it literally. Too bad all those people reading her stuff will think thats what we do out here on the wet west coast.
Posted by: Anthony at June 21, 2006 10:35 AM