Call It Fiction

By Geoffrey Wolff

LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN by ALICE MUNRO 250 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

Despite this young Canadian's conventional disclaimer that her novel is "autobiographical in form but not in fact," the pleasure to be taken from it comes from its fidelity to things as we imagine they really were. The book is a fiction for people who like to read brittle, yellow clips from newspapers published in towns where they never lived, who like to look through the snapshot albums of imperfect strangers.

Alice Munro uses a narrator named Del Jordan. She tells of growing to college age in the 1940s, in rural Canada, in the town of Jubilee, where a girl could count on hearing the names and the voices of friends on the local radio. Del looks back on her girlhood from the vantage of womanhood, and her memory has reduced rather than inflated the markers in her past.

She is the bright one in her family, the one destined to break out of Jubilee and leave her friends--victims of ebbing curiosity and reduced expectations--for good and all. Her mother collaborates in the escape. Mrs. Jordan sells encyclopedias, takes correspondence courses--"Great Thinkers of History"--and writes letters to the local newspaper. She is sick from a nearly fatal dose of soured dreams. Her ambitions for her daughter are at once generous and bitter, a self-fulfillment and self-reproach. Those ambitions are nearly "sabotaged by love." During her final year in Jubilee, Del is taken up by the equivalent of Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper, and seems bound to surrender herself to his hedged circumstances and vision. "Do you want to be the wife of a lumberyard worker?" her mother asks. "Do you want to join the Baptists' Ladies Aid?"

The threads of this yarn are common enough stuff. What Alice Munro makes of it is rare. For Del, looking back, tries to get it all just right. Nostalgia does not dampen her account, nor contempt deface it. "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable--deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."

Del tells in an epilogue about the novel she meant to write, a romance of suicide, insanity, and extreme summers and winters. A catalogue of Jubilee's objects. A street gazette. Del was once "somebody who believed that the only duty of a writer is to produce a masterpiece." Whatever Miss Munro once was, she is not that somebody. Her achievement is small but fine. By her tact, and power to recall, select and reduce, she has translated Jubilee into a birthplace, or something more than the name of a town. Call it fiction; praise it.

sbGeoffrey Wolff

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