Why I dislike Alice Munro but wish I were Jack Livings

The nice thing about a short story is that it's possible to know from literally the first page whether or not you are going to fall in love with it or not. I wouldn't say this is true of all writing - I can definitely think of a few novels whose first pages aren't a representative enough taste of what's to come. But I always know with short stories. Which makes reading them either a great experience or an extremely frustrating experience ... if I know I'm going to dislike the story after reading just the first page, what's the point of continuing to read it? And yet I read on anyway, fueled by that literary guilt that forces me to compulsively read each word of even the least deserving pieces of writing, just to avoid that horrible feeling of betrayal and abandonment that comes with setting aside an unfinished work.

When I started reading Alice Munro's story in BASS, I knew immediately that it wasn't the kind of thing I'd like. I don't like the third-person present tense narration, the characters, the purposefully removed tone (I-am-displaying-a-moment-in-someone's-life,-please-watch-and-admire). And of course, it's just my luck that this is one of those 30-page excursions rather than a nice little 10-page jaunt. So I struggled my way through all of "The View From Castle Rock," reading about the monotonous experiences of Andrew and Agnes and Old James and Young James and poor little sick coughing girl going to America, only to find that there's not even a rewarding ending. Worse was when I read Munro's little blurb in the back of the book and discovered that it was a purely self-indulgent exercise - a story based on the lives of some ancestors that she'd been doing some research on and wanted to imagine. Well, that's very nice for you to work out on your own, but must you really submit this to major publications and force it down other people's throats? I was really very annoyed by the whole thing, and decided rashly that personal meditation on real events does not a valid short story make.

Then I got to Jack Livings' story, "The Dog," and I was forced to change my tune. This, too, was based on a real event (a story that a Chinese woman in his English course presented as part of the class), but Livings lent it a weight, a heaviness, a purpose - a reason to exist beyond a mere hypothetical historical hole-filling that I didn't find in Munro's work.

Comparing the last paragraphs of each story is telling. Munro's story ends on a very factual, too-ponderous explanation of Young James' fate:

Young James was dead within a month of the family's landing at Quebec. His name is here, but surely he cannot be. They had not yet taken up their land when he died; they had not even seen this place. He may have been buried somewhere along the way from Montreal to York or in that hectic new town itself. Perhaps in a raw temporary burying ground now paved over, perhaps without a stone in a churchyard, where other bodies would someday be laid on top of his. Dead of some mishap in the busy streets, or of a fever, or dysentery, or any of the ailments, the accidents, that were the common destroyers of little children in his time.

Livings' story, on the other hand, ends with a delicately enigmatic transition from plot to purpose:

It was obvious to everyone that Chen Wei meant to extract a measure of revenge from his wife. Sweat rolled over his brow and his jaw was working furiously at something. Everyone waited for him to make a move, and he stood in the yard for an embarrassingly long time, the plates clacking wetly against his chest while the dog arched its back playfully, just out of reach. Finally, Chen Wei turned to his wife and shouted, "You've cooked for a pack of dogs, so let the head of the family have the first bite." And with that, he hurled the plates at the dog. As the dog tore at the bounty before it, Li Yan tightened her grip on her stack of plates and turned to face her husband's family, as if to issue a challenge. But after a moment nothing had come to her. As she looked across the valley at the dark hills and the immense black sky, she had the strange feeling that she had made a great discovery, that she had entered uncharted waters. But she didn't know yet what to do with this knowledge, so for the time being she stood quietly, the plates clutched to her chest, as if she expected someone to wrest them from her.

When I read these paragraphs, there is just something so quietly revealing about Livings' work, and something so off-puttingly blatant about Munro's.