When I Was Young And
in My Prime
by Alayna Munce
Nightwood Editions, 2005
Reviewed by Alex Boyd
The American writer Barry Yourgrau
begins his stories as concisely as "I go to sea. For various
reasons, I fall overboard." His modern fables are sharp and
amusing, but suffer a little bit from a kind of self-conscious
cleverness. Alayna Munce, in writing When I Was Young and In My Prime,
demonstrates she’s no less interested in being concise and in the
scattered, essential moments, the stepping-stones in a life. It’s only
fair to say the two writers have different goals, but Munce is
ultimately a more serious and meaningful writer, with a novel that
gracefully blends perspectives and approaches, creating an unnamed
central narrator as much through her voice as by building up the
surrounding world. Her narrator is a young woman navigating the first
few years of a marriage even as she witnesses the opposite stage in
life: her work in a retirement home and the decline of her grandparents.
As a poet, Munce knows how to make
observations that are striking and concise. A drunk in the corner of a
bar "had one too many and his face had slipped its anchor, was
drifting out to sea." A poet generally takes a while to write a
novel, because this way of finding sifted, concentrated meaning takes
time, and they sometimes end up with wandering, exquisite but ponderous
books (Michael Turner said reading Fugitive Pieces was like
"eating a flower"). But Munce has a light touch, and the
ability to switch gears, recognizing that dialogue shouldn’t be made
from the same slightly dreamy material as description, so that it sounds
like things people would actually say. Here’s a conversation between
the narrator and her husband:
"I don’t know why people think
they can pursue happiness directly anyway. It doesn’t work that
way," James says. He’s back from his tour and we’re
celebrating his birthday with a bottle of wine on the steps of the
front porch. Streetlights on. My head in his lap.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean happiness is a
by-product. Happiness is beside the point."
"What is the point then?"
"I don’t know. Doing right by
people. Becoming really good at one or two things. Noticing
shit."
"And if you do those things –
living right – then you’ll be happy on the side?"
"No, not necessarily. Not
exactly. No guarantees."
Enough description to set the scene,
the important dialogue and then we move on. It’s a book with a
palpable wisdom, which is refreshing in a culture that now only loves
data. Our narrator isn’t looking to shape herself into an ideal
someone else will define, but is looking to further relax into the
person she already instinctively knows she is: "Married at nineteen
in this day and age. I thought I’d found a shortcut. To what though? I
didn’t have clear idea, but intuited a strenuousness, a muscularity,
both noble and animal, in the notion of mating for life." Passages
about the decline of the elderly find subtle ways to suggest something
of the grandness and the failure of our lives, that we have the ability
to work on and develop ourselves even as our bodies all eventually
betray us: "And who darns your socks" the nurse asks Grandpa
as she’s putting them onto him. "I do." His speech is
agonizingly slow, but the nurse is patient. "Me, myself and I. Not
the neatest job in the world, but it works by God."
Guy Davenport suggests that the writer
is "the keeper of the past, and is therefore a guide to the
future," even that poetry is "the voice of the spirit,"
and so "we keep coming back around to the poet as a kind of
theologian, not one with first principles and dogma, but one searching
for the source of spirit." In an interview, Munce suggests the book
is "not the masterpiece that when I was young I imagined my first
book would be, the Great Canadian Novel. It’s just this book, this
modest, imperfect, flawed offering, but I can live with it. Maybe it has
some good moments and has something to offer."
But great Canadian novels sneak up on
us, as humble offerings by Canadians rather than self consciously
Canadian offerings. To say this book has some good moments is an
understatement: everyone will find something of value in such a
carefully written and subtly meaningful book.
Alex
Boyd is a Toronto writer. |
