The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alice Munro · nine stories · McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 2001 · scored on Munro’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and no sentence of the stories quoted
Mode
The long story as a life seen whole; realist short fiction that covers decades and arrives at its meaning sideways
Mythos
The fairy tale of the plain servant and the forged token of love, its machinery made of malice; a crossing of water at night with a young ferryman, back to the living; the faithful old couple of the fable, inverted
Phase
Nine separate spans, from childhood to old age, between the middle of the century and the 1990s, each leaping across years without transition
Presentation
Fiction; nine stories in the author’s order, the first giving the book its title, many of them long, each told with its connecting years left out
Register
Plain, exact and unhurried, cool by design, shifting without a mark between a girl’s spite, an old professor’s self-examination and a housekeeper’s practical thoughts
Scale
Private lives in small Ontario towns and the West, each seen across its decades
Governing Proposition
Nine long stories follow lives across decades in the small towns of Ontario and the West: a housekeeper who goes west on the strength of love letters two girls forged to humiliate her, a sick woman driven at night onto a floating bridge, a writer who takes a relative’s story for her own, a husband who ends by bringing another man to his wife, lost to dementia in a care home. The wager of the book is that a life is set by chance, even by malice, more than by intention, that memory revises what happened so that the life can be lived with, and that a story which leaps across the years can show this as no continuous telling could.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title is a game. In the first story two girls set two names side by side, strike out letters, and count what is left through five words, hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage, to tell what the pair will come to. It is a children’s fortune, played as a joke. The book takes its name from the joke and its law from what comes of it. Chance, even malice, will set a life’s course, and the count of letters will turn out to have been right.
The girls have a larger joke, and they aim it at Johanna, a housekeeper, plain and practical. They forge a correspondence in a man’s name, Edith among them, and lead Johanna to believe she is loved. Johanna acts on it. She has furniture shipped west, buys a ticket and takes the train to a town in Saskatchewan, and there she finds the man, sick. She nurses him. She marries him. She gets a husband, a child and a life, and the girls who meant to humiliate her have made the fairy tale come true.
The story does not end on the marriage. It goes back, late, to Edith, and lets her learn what came of the hoax: a cruelty that worked, whether or not it was redeemed. The management of the forged letters is a feat of plotting done without visible plot, and every movement in it is required: remove the furniture, the train or the late glimpse of Edith and the reversal does not hold. It is the first of nine stories, and it sets the terms for the rest. A life is not made by intention. It is made by what happens, and then by what the mind can do with it.
Movement II
The book is nine stories in Munro’s order: “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”; “Floating Bridge”; “Family Furnishings”; “Comfort”; “Nettles”; “Post and Beam”; “What Is Remembered”; “Queenie”; “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”. It was published in 2001 by McClelland and Stewart in Toronto, and in the same year by Knopf in New York and Chatto and Windus in London. Many of the stories are long, and they are long in a particular way: each covers years, sometimes decades, and leaps across them without transition, so that the connecting time is simply left out.
In the second story a woman has been ill and expects to die. On the day she learns that her illness may not kill her after all, she is driven at night by a teenage boy out onto a floating bridge across a marsh. The boards move under her on the water. What happens there is small, a kiss and a sense of the dark around her, and it is a passage back into life. The register does not rise to meet it; the story gives the moment flatly, and the height comes from the placing, not from the voice.
Beneath it lies an older pattern, kept below the surface where Munro keeps all her patterns: a crossing of water at night, with a young ferryman, from the side of the dying to the side of the living. The story does not name it, and a reader need not feel it for the scene to work. That is the method and its cost at once. The myth is there, and it bears weight in this story and in the first; across most of the book it stays under the realist surface, and the people remain persons in small towns.
Movement III
The third story is about a story. A writer takes something that happened in her family, a relative’s story that was not hers to tell, and makes it into her own work, and the story follows what the taking costs and what it leaves her with: the theft, and her solitude afterward. It is the book’s statement about its own art. The writer takes from the people who love her, and the work is made of what she took.
In this story the method turns on itself. The form is Munro’s own, made by the 1980s in The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love and Open Secrets, out of an inheritance she did not hide: the story of Chekhov and of Joyce’s Dubliners, and the regional realism of the American South that she named among her teachers. Her swerve from them, the long story that covers decades and arrives at its meaning sideways, in a late scene the reader did not know was the point, was a large one, and it had been taken before this book. Here it is refined: more elliptical, readier to end on what is not said, and able to make its own procedure the subject.
The instrument is the sentence and the structure together. The sentence is plain, exact and unhurried. Its register shifts without a mark between a girl’s spite, an old professor’s self-examination and a housekeeper’s practical thoughts. The leaps in time are placed so that the seam is not seen until it has been crossed; information is held back and released where it will revalue everything before it; and each story lands on a small concrete thing, a gesture, an object, an overheard line, that carries its whole weight. The consistency is the strength and the limit: across nine stories the moves become predictable, and the range of voice is narrower than the range of people.
Movement IV
Two people who knew each other as children meet again as adults. A storm comes on, and they shelter in the weeds of a golf course. There he tells her that his young son was killed in an accident at home: a confidence given in the storm to someone who knew him before any of it. The story spans the ages of a life, from childhood to the far side of grief, and the storm is the one point where those ages touch.
Memory is the book’s other subject, and “What Is Remembered” gives it its sharpest form. An afternoon’s adultery is kept, and reshaped, for decades, carried through a marriage and revised as it goes, so that the life around it can be lived with. Told as a novel, the story would have to supply the years between the afternoon and the memory, and would lose what it finds, that memory works in the gap. Told as one scene, it would have no memory to show. The leap across the years is the instrument of the knowledge.
That law, chance and desire setting the course and the mind revising what happened so that it can go on, is never broken in the nine stories. It holds from children forging letters to an old man watching his wife. What limits it is the field it is tested on. The milieu is narrow: small-town and suburban Ontario and British Columbia, mostly one class and one people, and the tone runs within a cool band. The state and public life are absent, labour is glimpsed, and the sacred is not pursued. Every story is a private life, and the social order is the ground on which the lives stand, not the thing the stories disclose.
Movement V
The last story takes its title from a children’s song. Grant and Fiona have been married a long time. Years before, Grant, a university teacher, had affairs with students, and the marriage outlasted them. Now Fiona’s memory is failing, and she goes into a care home. When Grant visits her, she has attached herself to another resident, Aubrey, and seems to have no particular use for her husband. The story needs Grant’s history: its ending requires a husband with something to be forgiven.
The fable of the faithful old couple is inverted. Grant, the unfaithful husband, ends by bringing the other man to her. The wronged spouse’s forgetting has been a kind of freedom, and the faithless husband keeps faith at last by giving his wife away. At the close Fiona seems to recognise Grant after the long estrangement of her illness, and the story leaves the meaning of the moment unsettled: whether the recognition is real, a performance or a mercy, and whether Grant’s errand was love or a last vanity.
The story has had a larger life than the book around it. Sarah Polley filmed it as Away from Her (2006), and it became one of the best-known and most studied stories of its decade, read on age and dementia, on marriage and infidelity, on care, and on the ethics of Grant’s last act; the title story was filmed in turn as Hateship Loveship (2013). The Nobel Prize of 2013 was given to Munro as master of the contemporary short story. A reader who comes back to this book knowing its endings reads every early detail as a plant, and the stories change on return, as the lives in them change when the mind goes back.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it is put twice. Inside the stories it finds almost nothing to cut, though they look digressive. In the title story every movement serves the turn: the furniture shipped west, the forged letters, the girls’ spite, Johanna’s train to a Saskatchewan town and the sick man she finds there, the late glimpse of Edith learning what came of the hoax. Remove one and the reversal, malice producing a marriage, does not hold. In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” Grant’s old affairs with students are required by an ending that needs a husband with something to be forgiven. Across the book the test bites: the nine were not composed as a sequence, and the slighter stories restate a situation the others carry, a woman weighing a marriage against a life not taken.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. A life’s course is set by accident, even by malice, and the accident can turn to good: two girls forge love letters to humiliate a housekeeper, and the housekeeper gets a husband, a child and a life. Memory is a working revision of what happened, made so that a life can be lived with: in “What Is Remembered” an afternoon’s adultery is kept and reshaped for decades. A long marriage holds betrayal and devotion at once, and the wronged spouse’s forgetting can be a freedom. The writer takes from the people who love her. These are meanings, not moods, and the stories hold them without saying them. Held off the top because the field of disclosure is private life, and the social order appears as the ground of lives, not as the thing disclosed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation comes often for a book whose voice never rises, and it comes at the turns. In “Floating Bridge” a sick woman, on the day she learns her illness may not kill her after all, is driven at night by a teenage boy onto a floating bridge across a marsh, and the boards move under her on the water: a passage back into life, given as a kiss and a sense of the dark around her. In “Nettles” two people who knew each other as children shelter from a storm in the weeds of a golf course, and he tells her that his young son was killed in an accident at home. The close of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a recognition whose meaning is left unsettled. Held below the higher reaches because the register is cool by design, and each height is a single turn inside a story.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth evoked, and built in one story more than the rest. The title story has the bones of a fairy tale: a plain servant, a forged token of love, a journey west, a sick man nursed back, a marriage, and the spiteful girls who meant harm and made the tale come true. It is built, and it turns, since the fairy tale’s machinery is malice. “Floating Bridge” is a crossing of water at night with a young ferryman, back to the living. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” takes its title from a children’s song and inverts the faithful old couple of the fable. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is Munro’s method: the pattern stays under the realist surface, often below where a reader feels it; in most of the stories it bears no weight; and the figures remain persons in small Ontario towns and do not become archetypes.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the short story of Chekhov and of Joyce’s Dubliners, the regional realism of the American South that Munro named among her teachers, and above all her own form: the long story that covers decades, leaps in time without transition and arrives at its meaning sideways, in a late scene the reader did not know was the point. That was a large swerve in the history of the story, and it was made before this book, in The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love and Open Secrets. Here the form is refined, more elliptical, readier to end on what is not said, and “Family Furnishings” turns the method on itself by making the writer’s theft its subject. The stake in 2001 was small: a master working in her proven way, a wager placed on a known path.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Munro’s long story knows what neither the novel nor the conventional story knows: how a life looks when its decades are seen at once, the connecting years left out, so that a single afternoon or a single act stands against forty years and is revalued by them. Told as a novel, “What Is Remembered” would supply the marriage between the adultery and the memory, and lose its finding, that memory works in the gap. Told as a story of one scene, the title story would end with the girls’ prank and lose the marriage. The leaps in time are the instrument of the disclosure about chance and revision. Held off the top on the unit: a collection is additive, its nine stories stand in an order that could be another, and the form is the author’s general form, not one invented for this book.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over twenty-five years, inside a larger body of evidence on the author. Munro’s stories are among the most reread in English, and the criticism on them is extensive. Within it “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is one of the most studied stories of its decade, read on age and dementia, on marriage and infidelity, on care, and on the ethics of Grant’s last errand; “Family Furnishings” is read as one of Munro’s central statements on writing. The questions stay open: whether Fiona’s recognition is real, a performance or a mercy; whether Grant’s errand is love or a last vanity; whether the hoax was a cruelty redeemed or a cruelty that happened to work. Return changes the stories, since a reader who knows an ending reads every early detail as a plant. Held below the higher figures because part of the scholarship is on the author, and twenty-five years is a short test.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is short fiction in English in the 2000s. The intrinsic force is the book’s demonstration that the short story could carry a novel’s span and moral weight without the novel’s bulk, a case Munro had been making for twenty years and here made at full strength. That confirms a reorganisation already made rather than making one: the redirection of the story toward Munro’s form was the work of earlier collections. Reach that belongs to the author is not credited to the book, and reach that came late through the author is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” became one of the best-known stories of its decade, and Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006) carried it to a wide public; the collection stands among the books most often named as late Munro at her height; and the Nobel Prize of 2013, given to Munro as master of the contemporary short story, rests partly on it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print. Presence: continuous and international, renewed by two films, Away from Her (2006) and Hateship Loveship (2013), and by the Nobel Prize of 2013, with the last story anthologised and taught. Fabric: the surface is fixed to no moment, since the stories run from the middle of the century to the 1990s and their furniture is period by design, not by accident. What holds the axis where it stands is the kind of presence: a collection’s is narrower than a novel’s, and much of this book’s is carried by a single story. Twenty-five years demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Munro’s English, with no translation between. The command is of structure and of the sentence together, and it is load-bearing. The leaps in time are placed so that the reader does not see the seam until it is crossed; information is withheld and released at the point where it revalues everything before; the endings land on a small concrete thing, a gesture, an object, an overheard line, that carries the story’s whole weight. The sentence is plain, exact and unhurried, and its register shifts without a mark between a girl’s spite, an old professor’s self-examination and a housekeeper’s practical thoughts. The title story’s management of the forged correspondence is a feat of plotting done without visible plot. Held below the top on three charges: the method is so consistent that its moves become predictable across nine stories; not every story is pressed as hard as the best; and the range of voice is narrower than the range of people.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs the book: a life is shaped by chance and desire more than by intention, and the mind revises what happened so that it can go on. Take the two most distant elements: two schoolgirls forging love letters in a small Ontario town, and an old man watching his wife, in a care home, love someone else. They obey the same law. In each a deception, the girls’ or Grant’s own long one, produces an outcome no one intended, and someone lives inside the result. The law holds across the ages of life, from childhood in “Nettles” to old age in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, and across the decades the stories cover. Charged: the milieu is narrow, small-town and suburban Ontario and British Columbia, mostly one class and one people, and the tone runs within a cool band. The law is never broken; it is tested over a field narrower than its span of time.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what one book of nine stories holds. Consciousness, in every story, often across the decades of one life. Marriage and family, in nearly every story: courtship by forgery, a long marriage and its betrayals, a sister’s or a cousin’s life seen from beside it. Class, in the housekeeper and the merchant’s family, the well digger’s son and the doctor’s daughter, the newspaper writer and the university. The body, in cancer, ALS and dementia. Sexuality, in adulteries remembered and desired. Art, in the writer’s appropriation. A regional history, the small towns of Ontario from the middle of the century onward. They are integrated, not listed: one law of chance and revision joins them. What holds the axis is what is thin: the state and public life are absent, labour is glimpsed, the sacred is not pursued, and every story is a private life.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9, then The Unconcealment at 8.6, then The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.5. A command of structure and sentence together, the seam unseen until it is crossed and each story landing on a small concrete thing; disclosures that can be stated and hold, that chance and even malice set a life and that memory revises it so that it can be lived; a long story that sees a life’s decades at once; and a text whole and in print, its presence renewed by two films and the Nobel Prize, its surface fixed to no moment.
Limiting Dimension
The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, held by the method: the fairy tale is built in the title story and the crossing in “Floating Bridge”, but across most of the book the pattern stays under the realist surface, bears no weight, and leaves the people persons rather than archetypes. Next above it, The Swerve and The Encompassed at 7.8: a large swerve made in earlier books and refined here on a known path; and private lives held with the state, public life and the sacred left out. Then Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, a reorganisation of the story confirmed here rather than made.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 falls six tenths short, The Swerve at 7.8 seven tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 nine tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, published by McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, in 2001, and in the same year by Knopf, New York, and Chatto and Windus, London. It is scored as the collection as published, nine stories in Munro’s order, in her English, with no translation between. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no sentence of the stories is quoted. The story titles and the girls’ game that gives the book its title are given; everything else is paraphrased. The title story and “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” are known in their people, turns and endings; “Floating Bridge”, “Family Furnishings” and “Nettles” in outline and in their central scenes; “Comfort”, “Post and Beam”, “What Is Remembered” and “Queenie” in outline only, and the axes argued from particulars rest on the first five. Sarah Polley’s film Away from Her (2006), from the last story, and Hateship Loveship (2013), from the first, are separate works and not part of this one. Munro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count, the lengths of the stories, the titles of later printings and the matter of the stories known only in outline, are not given. Citations are by story; the five movements on this page follow five of the nine stories and are the desk’s selection, not the book’s division.