Sunday Shorts

Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro
2009, Random House Audio
10 unabridged cds/ total listening 11.5 hours
read by Kimberly Farr and Arthur Morey
303 pages

 

I’ve never been one for short stories, but even though these stories are depressing and dark, they are mesmerizing and I seem to be hooked on them.  The reader (since I’m listening to the audio edition) might add to that- she reads really smoothly.  Haven't listened to any with the male reader yet.  The following synopses probably contain spoilers.  I want to remember the stories myself, so I've chosen to include them.  

1-“Dimensions”  Dori, still in her teens, married an orderly that took care of her dying mother.  He was much older, and quite controlling.  They had three kids in rapid succession, but he was crazy. One evening he became upset with her…..and killed the children.  The story takes place two years later, and follows Dori as she goes to visit Lloyd in prison, something she can’t stop herself from doing. When he tells her that he sees the children in heaven – and happy – it looks like her life will add a tiny hue of grayness to the black that it has become. Or at least that’s the take I get on it.

2-“Fiction” Joyce and her carpenter husband, John, separate after many married years when he falls for his much-younger apprentice.  Years later, Joyce meets up with the interloper’s daughter who had also been one of her music students.  She has become an author, writing a short story about their relationship as teacher and student – which bring up the question –does everyone  remember the past in the same way? 

3 – “Wenlock Edge” Told in the first person, a girl leaves home to go to college, where she has a roommate named Nina.  Nina has an arrangement with elderly Mr. Purvis.  When the narrator, at Nina’s urging, goes for dinner with him one night, she discovers she is to be completely naked. She complies.  There is nothing sexual that happens, but when she returns to her apartment she discovers Nina has disappeared.  She has gone to live with Ernie Botts, a character that the narrator had gone to dinner with a few times at the beginning of the story….

4- “Deep-Holes” Sally and Alex raise three children, but the focus of this story is the eldest, whose life changes after he falls into a chasm and breaks both legs.  He is nine at the time.  Extremely intelligent, but never receiving any positives from his father, he drops out of college, and then disappears completely.  Years later a brief meeting with his mother leaves her unsettled.  It left me unsettled – in a good, thoughtful way.