Shaking the Family Tree

This book of Munro’s short stories was the March selection for my book club and with the exception of the person who had recommended it, most of the group had found it slow going.  At the time, I was only halfway through the collection and though I didn’t hate it like some of my book club friends did, I was finding it hard to connect.  However, at about the halfway point, when these stories based on Munro’s family history, got closer generationally to Munro, I began to enjoy it more.

To backtrack, this is a book of short stories all involving members of Munro’s family, reaching back to 18^th century Scotland and continuing to the present day.  In the epilogue, “Messenger,” Munro mentions the curiosity towards the past that comes with old age, “when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine—sometimes cannot believe in—the future of our children’s children.  We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life” (347).  This is exactly what Munro is doing in these stories—turning small bits of information into stories about people who stand apart, who leave, who have children, and who die.  The interesting thing is to see how many of the characteristics that Munro has as a reader, writer, and independent person, exist in various forms in her ancestors and clearly that’s what intrigues her too.

My favorite story is the last one, “What do you want to know that for?” which alternates between Munro learning she has a lump in her breast and the investigation that she and her husband conduct into a mysterious crypt in a graveyard that they see while driving around one day.

Though I didn’t love this book, it does make me interested in reading some of Alice Munro’s other short stories collections.  She is a beautiful and blunt writer and I’m curious to see what she does with narratives not so close to home.