Too Much Happiness

Before last week I had never read any of the short stories of Canadian writer Alice Munro. With the publication of TOO MUCH HAPPINESS last month that makes 14 books she has written over a long career of writing short stories. I bought TOO MUCH HAPPINESS on the recommendation of a friend. Generally speaking, I am not much of a reader of short stories. I don’t know why; it’s just not my preference as far as fiction is concerned. The last writer of short stories that I got involved with was Raymond Carver. To a certain extent TOO MUCH HAPPINESS made me think of Carver’s work. The kind of people written about by both writers tend to be uneducated, have limited vision and understanding, can be mentally disturbed, very insecure, can be thrice-married, and even homicidal. Some are in dead-end jobs.
“Dimensions” is a good example of what I mean. Doree is twenty three and a cleaning woman, a job she happy with and has no plans to leave for something better. She is an innocent, very naïve, so much so she got swept off her feet while a teenager by a maniac named Lloyd who seduced her into marriage and got her pregnant to tune of three kids before she was twenty. Then one night, when she felt very uncomfortable with Lloyd, she slept at a friend’s house. When she went home the next morning she found all three children murdered by their father, who blamed her for what he did because she had left him last night. After he had been institutionalized for a while he tries to play her like he did when she was a teenager. He does it by telling her the children are appearing to him and they are doing well on the other side and not at all unhappy or mad at their father. Wanting her to come back to him, at least as a regular visitor, he tells her he will keep her apprised of their progress in this other dimension. She was intrigued by his fantasies about the kids, so soon afterwards she is on a bus heading to the hospital for another visit. But on the way there the driver has an accident; the bus hits a young man. When they stop the lad appears to be dead but she starts giving him CPR and lo, he revives and starts breathing on his own. Help is on the way. Her reaction to the emergency revealed something about her she wasn’t aware of before. Her quick reaction made her feel good about herself. When the bus driver said to get back on the bus as he has to get people to their destinations, she tells him to go ahead, she has decided to not go to the hospital and see her ex-husband. She doesn’t have to go anymore. She now knows she is more grounded in reality than Lloyd will ever be. Helping a lad who was in real crisis was more meaningful than traipsing around after the sorry tales of a madman. The kids were gone forever and that was that.
The second story I read was called “Fiction.” In it Munro dealt with a class of people who marry often and never seemed to find the right mate and therefore never find any real depth or comfort in a love relationship. They are like wounded butterflies fluttering from one bed and partner to the next, never quite finding what they think they want or need which is never all that clear to them. Munro cleverly interweaves all these games of musical marital chairs that take place over a matter of time, as they all grow older chasing their own tails. She ends the story with the main character, a woman named Joyce, who encounters the grown daughter of the tattooed woman who stole her first husband from her. The daughter was from a previous relationship but Joyce became her teacher for a short while, teaching her how to play the violin. The daughter is now a writer and she has just published her first work of fiction, a novel, which she buys and finds out is based on her first marriage and its collapse. The daughter has turned what was a heartbreaking experience for Joyce into a piece of fiction that left out a lot of the story. She decides to go to the book store where the girl is autographing copies of her novel; she goes expecting some kind of encounter with the author. However, since so many years have passed the daughter doesn’t recognize Joyce; she signs her book, smiles, and says next please. Joyce leaves feeling let down and crushed that the girl treated her as a complete stranger. As she walks away she thinks that someday she’ll tell somebody about this quasi-encounter, this experience of non-recognition, it’ll make a good story. It’ll be her counter-vision of the fictional truth.
“Some Women” was a story about a contest among a few women acting as caregivers to a dying man. It is a clever gathering together of the crosscurrents of who will control the last phase of a man’s life. The thirteen year old girl in the story, who is never named, is very clear-headed about what is going on in the house. She calls the man “the prize,” even though he is hardly an example wondrous manhood, but instead a balding middle aged man dying of Leukemia.
His name is Bruce Crozier. His stepmother is in the house, Dorothy Crozier, and his wife, Sylvia, who that summer was teaching summer school at a college forty miles away. She hired the thirteen year old girl to help keep an eye on her husband’s needs while she wasn’t available. The stepmother is a cranky old woman who gets outflanked in regard her step-son, so instead she spends her time giving the young girl a lot of lip. The fourth woman in the house is a masseuse named Roxanne Hoy, a local woman with an extraverted personality married to a mechanic. She was hired to relieve poor Bruce of his sore muscles as he never gets out of bed any more. Since she is a take-charge kind of person it is she who gets locked in combat with the wife. Roxanne tries to insinuate her way into the good graces of Bruce who starts playing board games with her to pass the time. But, strangely, her motivation in regard controlling Bruce has little to do with him, having more to do with her sibling rivalry with her older sister who always had the first pick of the boys, while she got the rejects and nerds. Nor does it have anything to do with her husband. This time she felt she had the inside track with the wife gone so much, but where it was all heading, and why, she never stopped to think about. She was just carried on a stream of possible victory. The situation in the Crozier household seemed to develop on its own momentum.
The main event between the wife and Ms. Hoy, the interloper, finally came to a head. It was Mr. Crozier who stepped in to bring closure to the contest. He calls for the teenage girl and tells her to lock his bedroom door and to give the key only to his wife. He had grown tired of Roxanne and her obvious manipulations. That ends it for her; she is ostracized and knows it and so finally leaves for good. The teenager reveals an uncanny understanding of the situation just resolved. This is how she summed it up: “I understood pretty well the winning and losing that had taken place, between Sylvia and Roxanne, but it was strange to think of the almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier—and to think that he could have the will to make a decision, even to deprive himself, so late in life. The carnality at death’s door—or true love, for that matter—were things I had to shake off with shivers down my spine.”
Not long after Roxanne left the employ of the Croziers, she and her husband left town. Sylvia rented a cottage by the lake and Mr. Crozier died in peace there before autumn leaves changed color.