Suspicion of Sentiment

Benjamin Markovits

• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
  Chatto, 323 pp, £14.99, November 2001, ISBN 0 7011 7292 4

‘It was love she sickened at,’ Alice Munro wrote in The Beggar Maid. ‘It was the enslavement, the self-abasement, the self-deception.’ If that’s her attitude it doesn’t promise much romance for her latest collection, despite its title; and in fact the book describes not so much love as the subtle changes in loyalty and disposition of which sexual love is only one (and not the most important) example. Munro once said that ‘the whole state of being in love is one that I haven’t written about nearly as much as I want to.’ Though this book may seem to be another attempt at it, she prefers to talk around her subject, linking her stories through something slightly different. ‘What on earth is this feeling that somehow things have to connect or . . . have to be part of a larger whole?’ she asked on another occasion. She is most interested in moments of insight and the difficulties her characters (never mind their author) face in trying to connect them. Love deceives partly because it requires constancy, in both senses of the word, to an individual and a state of mind. It’s no accident that Munro prefers short stories to novels.