Why Alice Munro’s Work Felt so Empty

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is David Frum, an Atlantic staff writer who has written about the J. D. Vance he once knew, the dangers of American autocracy, and his daughter’s last gift.

David is a lifelong fan of the Talking Heads, a rehabilitated T. S. Eliot enthusiast, and a critic of Alice Munro’s writing. He is also keen to visit an Impressionist exhibition that will be touring in Washington, D.C., in the fall. It features a collection of French paintings that established the artistic movement more than a century ago by “revolutionizing art itself.”

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

• A trip to one of the hottest cities on the planet
• Conservative women have a new Phyllis Schlafly.
• The people who quit dating

The Culture Survey: David Frum

The last debate I had about culture: This summer, one of the daughters of the writer Alice Munro went public with an accusation that Munro’s second husband—the daughter’s stepfather—had repeatedly sexually abused her throughout her childhood. The daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, said that even after she explicitly informed Munro of the full extent of the abuse, Munro remained loyal to the abuser—and even seemed to feel that it was Skinner who had somehow wronged her, betrayed her. The abuser, now deceased, pleaded guilty in 2005 to a criminal charge arising from the abuse and received a suspended sentence with two years of probation. The story was reportedly talked about within Canadian literary circles. But somehow, it did not become fully public information until this year.

It’s hardly news that great artists are not always nice people—in fact, quite often, they are very bad people. For me, however, the debate over Alice Munro was not How could a great artist do such a bad thing? It was, This bad thing at last enables me to articulate why I never thought Alice Munro was a great artist in the first place. In my native Canada, Munro was regarded as not only a great talent but also a kind of moral witness. Yet to me, her much-praised short stories always seemed insipid and tedious. Many of them concern unspoken secrets, but the secrets and their aftermath never add up to much: They just sort of hang in the air over some small Canadian town, going nowhere and meaning little. Suddenly, the inconsequentiality of her narratives makes sense; shrugging off big news is how she treated her own most important lifelong secret, after all.

The poet John Keats asserted that all we need to know about art is that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That may not be quite the whole story, but I think I’m ready to argue over a pint in the artist’s bar that habitual lying kills the soul of art in a way that other human failings may not. I can resume the debate about her art with a new understanding of why her art always felt so empty to me.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: As a teenager, I loved, loved, loved the music of the Talking Heads, and I still love, love, love it. Has the terror of civil unrest ever been more danceable than in their “Life During Wartime”?

Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway
A place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I’m getting used to it now

As a teenager, I also loved, loved, loved the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Now I’m not so sure. Yes, The Waste Land still haunts me. Stray lines from other poems stick with me too: “garlic and sapphires in the mud” from “Burnt Norton.” But a lot of Eliot’s solemn mysteries, his oracular enigmas—about which I wrote so many high-school and college term papers!—now appear to me as attitude in place of art. Oscar Wilde wrote a story titled “The Sphinx Without a Secret.” I have come to suspect that this damning apothegm may also apply to my adolescent literary hero. [Related: T. S. Eliot saw all this coming.]

The upcoming arts event I’m most looking forward to: A century and a half ago, a small group of Frenchmen—and one Frenchwoman—invited friends and colleagues to join a group exhibition. A new style featured in the show did not yet have a name but would soon acquire one: Impressionism. The show opened April 15, 1874, in a photographer’s former studio on the Boulevard des Capucines.

In spring 2024, enterprising curators at the Paris Musée d’Orsay gathered many of the paintings that had confronted the world a century and a half ago. In the fall, the show will travel to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art.

I visited the show in Paris and am now keenly looking forward to spending time with it again in Washington.

There’s a lot to say about the show, but here’s just one thing. Paris in 1874 was a city suffering the aftermath of siege and revolution. Famous buildings, including the Tuileries Palace and the great Renaissance-style City Hall of Paris, had been burned to the ground. Virtually every tree on every boulevard and park had been felled for firewood. Thousands had perished of starvation during the German siege from September 1870 to January 1871; thousands more were killed during the subsequent uprising known as the Paris Commune. All of this followed nearly 20 years—less bloody but no less disorienting—of destruction and reconstruction in medieval Paris by Napoleon III and his chief architect, Baron Haussmann.

Yet this tumult went almost entirely undepicted by that great Impressionist show of 1874. At that year’s official Paris Salon—the government-sponsored show that enforced official taste—artists exhibited pictures of combat. The Impressionists responded to revolutionary times not with editorial comment upon the revolution, but by revolutionizing art itself.

A poem that I return to: My mother died at an early age. She was only 54. I was not quite 32; my first child, a little girl, was then only eight months old. Soon afterward, a friend introduced me to a poem by Thomas Hardy, “The Voice.” It begins: “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me.”

Hardy wrote “The Voice” after the death of his wife. In the key stanza, the poet wonders whether his beloved really is “calling” to him, or whether the sound is only an illusion caused by a rainy autumn day:

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

That first child of mine, a baby when her grandmother died, herself died suddenly this year, aged 32. Now I am again choking up over Hardy’s poem.

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

The Week Ahead

1. The Crow, an action-movie reboot about a man who is resurrected so he can take revenge against the people who killed him and his partner (in theaters Friday)
2. Season 2 of That ’90s Show, the sequel series to That ’70s Show, about the antics of a new generation of teenagers (part three premieres Thursday on Netflix)
3. There Are Rivers in the Sky, a novel by Elif Shafak about three characters in different eras who live along two rivers (out Tuesday)

Essay

My Criminal Record Somehow Vanished

By Mark O’Brien

Sixteen years ago, during my last semester of law school, I caused a drunk-driving crash that killed my girlfriend. I pleaded guilty to negligent manslaughter and faced up to a decade in prison, but thanks to my girlfriend’s family’s forgiveness and whatever unearned sympathy I received as a middle-class white man, my sentence amounted to a few months in jail followed by several years on probation. Considering the sentences faced by many, I’d been very lucky.

Ever since, I’ve been among the 80 million Americans living with a criminal record and all its consequences. I’ve fantasized about what my life would be like if my record simply vanished. Not long ago, it sort of did—one more instance of a system that’s not just unjust but also capricious and poorly administered.

Read the full article.

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