Alice Munro’s short story “Boys and Girls,” published in her 1968 debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, begins with the sentence, “My father was a fox farmer” and continues on:

That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders.  These companies supplied us with heroic calendars to hang, one on each side of the kitchen door.  Against a background of cold blue sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers, plumed adventurers planted the flags of England or of France; magnificent savages bent their backs to the portage.

This is the classic Munro, the one who ranks among the most acclaimed and beloved writers of short stories in the canon.  There is the bleak, violent description of the foxes’ slaughter, rendered into high tragedy by the musicality of Munro’s sentence construction.  There is the intensely autobiographical tone of the piece and the bright and vivid recollection of distinctive details of her childhood in Ontario.  Her word choice alone lends the scene of a humble Canadian kitchen the quality of legend. 

Munro has built her career on her lyricism and on her flawless transmutation of personal experience into fiction.  In The View from Castle Rock, Munro’s latest book she crosses that boundary between fiction and history—or does she?  After taking a “more than random interest” in the history of her father’s family, the Laidlaws, she composed twelve pieces that combined her research with “a special set” of short stories.  These stories were set apart from her others in that they were even more autobiographical.

For example, we learn in the fifth section, “Working for a Living,” that Munro’s father was, in fact, a fox farmer.  All of Munro’s gifts as a writer are fully evident as she describes, among other things, how her father and mother met; the stormy relationship between her head-strong mother and equally head-strong grandmother; and the grisly nitty-gritty of running a silver fox farm.

“[F]or the meat-eaters, such as mink” Munro recalls, describing the bait her father used to lure his prey, “there was delectable fish bait mixed by himself and ripened in a jar in the ground.  A similar meat mix for foxes was buried...they sought it out to roll upon, reveling in the pungency of decay.”

I love Munro’s writing, and with sections such as these it’s not hard to see why.  Can you imagine a more repulsive image than a jar of rotting fish parts?  And yet, like a silver fox reveling in the ripeness of decomposing meat, the reader also luxuriates in the lushness of Munro’s prose.  That’s why it’s a shame that it’s wasted on the first four sections of this book, which make clear the fact that Munro has fallen victim to that disease of the baby boomer—the genealogical obsession.  My mom caught it last year and started mumbling about inherited family tendencies towards knock-knees and our origins in a small French town, circa 1800.  We ignored her.  It’s harder to do that with a world-famous, world-class short story writer. 

The fact is that life doesn’t come pre-packaged in neat short story-sized sections, nor do the many letters and journals that Munro found.  Her ancestors are much less riveting writers than Munro herself, and the inclusion of their letters and journal entries is dull and jarring.  They serve no purpose and their presence is explained by--what?  A letter written by Andrew, presumably Munro’s great-great-great-great-grandfather (another flaw is that it is difficult to trace the relationship between each of Munro’s characters to herself) concludes with a meta-fictional gimmick, “When Andrew has added this paragraph....” The placement of other fragments seems more haphazard.  While finding these remnants in some dusty library clearly delighted Munro, it delighted this reader much less so.

While her characters are, as always, beautifully and sensitively drawn, many storylines end without resolution, leaving the reader frustrated and curious—just as Munro was herself, I’m sure.  There is a lovely wistfulness to some of these endings, like the story of the feisty, doomed girl that Munro’s ancestor Walter meets on the boat from Scotland to Canada.  Nettie Carbert’s father invites Walter to live with them for Nettie’s remaining time, an invitation which Walter declines.  But Walter entertains daydreams about her “till the day he dies...Most secretly, he will imagine a radiant recovery, Nettie’s acquiring a tall and maidenly body, their life together.  Such foolish thoughts as a man may have in secret.”

And there the story of Nettie ends.  In real life, sometimes we don’t get to see what eventually happens to everyone who touches us.  But we’ve been taught to expect more from art. 

It is only when we arrive at Munro’s personal memories that the stories become more coherent and burst into life--mysterious, painful, sometimes unbearably sexy, and true.  Munro’s description of the first time she met a boyfriend’s family is devastatingly perceptive.  “He hardly looked at me,” Munro says, “but when he did it was a steady look, laying claim, and it hit me and resonated as if I’d been a drum.”  This is it--the exact same look that my boyfriend gave me the first time I met his parents, the two of us ensconced in the rituals of courtship, clearing dishes together with the parents, in the process of growing up to become parents, and belonging together.

There are many other truths like this, starting from when Munro was a child and continuing through to the present day search for a crypt, akin to the one where, we sense Munro thinking, she will probably soon be interred.  I suppose that’s where the genealogical obsession comes from--the urgent need to believe that someday, someone will hunt you down the way you are hunting down people today. 

The craft of fiction, however, lies in what Munro’s town calls “making things up.”  That is to say, polishing what happens to people and making these scenes a lens through which we can view our own lives.  Munro is very good at this craft.  It’s too bad the lens was a little foggy this time.