Rachel Aviv and Anne Enright on Alice Munro

Alice Munro (Photo by John Reeves)

I see that Jane Mayer and Rachel Aviv won George Polk Awards this year. Mayer won for her “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History” (newyorker.com, December 1, 2024). Aviv won for her “You Won’t Get Free of It” (The New Yorker, December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025). Congratulations to both of them. I confess I only skimmed Mayer’s piece. Political writing is not my bag. Aviv’s piece is a different matter. I read every word. It blew me away. It’s a deep dive into decades of Alice Munro’s family history and correspondence, along with her personal writing and published fiction, in order to recount her daughter Andrea’s sexual abuse and Munro’s subsequent use of that story for her own work. It shook my admiration for Munro’s writing right to its foundation. See my comment here. 

A few weeks after reading Aviv’s piece, I encountered another absorbing assessment of the Munro controversy – Anne Enright’s “Alice Munro’s Retreat” (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2024). She writes,

As with many revelations, all this realigns what we already knew about Munro’s life in a way that makes more sense. It also throws a sharp light on Munro’s later fiction, throughout which elements of Andrea’s experience, and all that came after it, can be found. Some people may choose not to read the later stories: they may find it egregious that Munro both dismissed the damage done to her daughter and used it to fuel her work. Yet the tug of this long-kept secret is there on the page and, as with many unpleasant discoveries, once you see it, you find it everywhere.

Enright analyzes several of Munro’s key stories. She concludes: “I have read Munro all my life, and reading her again in light of these revelations, I find that I cannot take back my great love for her work; it was too freely given.”

I feel the same way.  

December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 Issue

Rachel Aviv, in her disturbing “You Won’t Get Free of It,” in this week’s issue, explores the complex psychosexual dynamics of Alice Munro’s family life, including the sexual abuse of her youngest daughter Andrea by her husband Gerry, and Munro's shocking decision to stay with Gerry even after Andrea told her about it. It sounds like a Munro short story, but it’s real life, with real-life consequences.  

I confess I'm struggling with my response to this piece. I'm a fan of Munro's writing. Part of me wants to defend her. Part of me realizes that what she did - "trade her daughter for art," in Aviv's words - is indefensible. I'm conflicted. "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it" - that's what Janet Malcolm said of the defendant Mazoltuv Borukhova in Iphigenia in Forest Hills. That's the way I feel right now about Alice Munro. I need more time to resolve my feelings about what she did. I may never resolve them. 

In the meantime, I'll keep an eye out for other responses to the controversy. I'd love to read Lorrie Moore on it. She admired Munro's work immensely. How is she grappling with Andrea's revelations? 

November 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Aviv’s “Personal Statement,” a profile of writer Joyce Carol Oates. This piece differs from most New Yorker literary profiles. It has a clear, strong theme, captured in its tagline: “Joyce Carol Oates’s relentless search for self.” Okay, sign me up, I’ll read that. How we become who we are is, for me, one of life’s central mysteries. Aviv does an excellent job exploring it in this piece. It’s fascinating to read about an eighty-five-year-old writer, author of “sixty-three novels, forty-seven collections of short stories, and numerous plays, librettos, children’s novels, and books of poetry” and see how insecure she is about her own identity. Aviv writes,

Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull, but Oates, who has long been concerned with the question of personality and says she doubts whether she actually has one, has never exhausted her curiosity. There are only so many ways to dramatize the problem of being a self, one might think, but Oates keeps coming back to it, as if there is something she still needs to figure out.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s fiction. But I devour her book reviews, a number of which have appeared in The New Yorker: see, for example, “Earthly Delights” (February 5, 2001); “Love Crazy” (March 3, 2003); “Rack and Ruin” (April 30, 2007); “The Death Factory” (September 29, 2014); and “Ocular Proof” (February 26, 2018). My favorite Oates reviews are “The Treasure of Comanche Country” (on Cormac McCarthy) and “In Rough Country” (on Annie Proulx), included in her great 2010 essay collection In Rough Country. Oates is an excellent critic – descriptive and analytical. If she’s insecure in her identity, I don’t detect it in her reviews. She appears completely self-assured.

Not that I’m questioning Aviv’s assessment. Her “quest for identity” theme threads her piece from beginning to end: “The persona was perhaps no more real than the ladylike role she inhabited at parties”; “Her short stories from the time, many of which revolve around romantic betrayals, are so precise about the impossibility of trying to cohere as a personality in the world”; “The work had piled up, giving form to aspects of her identity that she couldn’t otherwise see, but the process didn’t seem to have really changed her.” 

My favorite line in “Personal Statement” is “She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal.” That “uniquely incurious” made me smile. In Aviv’s piece, a savvy journalist-detective comes up against a foxy, guarded genius. 

Two New Yorker Writers Make the Times' "10 Best Books of 2022"

Hooray for two New Yorker writers – Hua Hsu and Rachel Aviv – for making The New York Times’ “The 10 Best Books of 2022”! Hsu is on the list for his memoir Stay True, part of which recently appeared in The New Yorker as “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” (August 22, 2022). Aviv is there for her Strangers To Ourselves, a study of psychological distress, part of which appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker, under the title “The Challenge of Going off Psychiatric Drugs” (April 9, 2019). Congratulations to both writers! 

Postscript: There's another book by a New Yorker writer that I'd put on that list - Ben McGrath's Riverman, based on his brilliant New Yorker piece "The Wayfarer."

April 11, 2016 Issue

There’s a scene in Gay Talese’s extraordinary "The Voyeur's Motel," in this week’s issue, that went straight into my collection of unforgettable New Yorker images. The piece is about a man named Gerald Foos, who, in the sixties, bought a motel in Aurora, Colorado, “in order to become its resident voyeur.” He converted the motel’s attic into a viewing platform. In 1980, Foos contacted Talese, suggesting Talese write his story. Talese decided to meet him. He traveled to Aurora, stayed at Foos’s motel (the Manor House Motel), crawled across the carpeted attic catwalk with Foos, looked down through the specially designed ceiling vents, and watched a naked couple having sex. Here’s the scene:

Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman’s head. I realized my carelessness only when Foos grabbed me by the neck and, with his free hand, pulled my tie up through the slats. The couple below saw none of this: the woman’s back was to us, and the man had his eyes closed.

It’s a creepy moment, but also whacky – Hitchcock via Woody Allen. I smiled when I read it. Talese’s viewing of the attic catwalk is crucial to his piece. He says, “If I had not seen the attic viewing platform with my own eyes, I would have found it hard to believe Foos’s account.” I would’ve found it hard to believe, too. Talese’s use of “I” is masterful. It authenticates his narrative.

There are two other excellent articles in this week’s issue – James Lasdun’s "Alone in the Alps and Rachel Aviv’s "The Cost of Caring" – but they’re overshadowed by “The Voyeur’s Motel,” which I think is destined to be some sort of oddball classic. 

May 5, 2014 Issue

This week’s issue contains three excellent pieces: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “A New Kind of Spy”; Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Hunt for El Chapo”; and Rachel Aviv’s “Prescription for Disaster.” What I like about them is the way the authors, writing for the most part in the first-person minor, occasionally enlarge their “I” ’s role to take the measure of their main characters. For example, in “A New Kind of Spy,” Bhattacharjee tells the story of how a Chinese-American engineer, Greg Chung, became the first American to be convicted of economic espionage. Most of the piece is a reconstruction of events of which Bhattacharjee has no personal knowledge. It’s based on interviews with, among others, F.B.I. agent Kevin Moberly, who investigated the Chung case. But in the piece’s brilliant last section, Bhattacharjee’s narrative “I” is more present. He writes,

Chung did not respond to my requests to visit him in prison, but Ling [Chung’s wife], who was never accused of a crime, reluctantly took my phone calls. One afternoon, I parked at the end of Grovewood Lane and walked to the iron gate in the Chungs’ driveway. There were cobwebs on the buzzer. The front yard was full of weeds, and an overturned wheelbarrow near the garage apparently hadn’t been used for years.

Thus begins the part of “A New Kind of Spy” that, for me, gives the piece the lived character of experience.

Similarly, in “Prescription for Disaster” ’s final section, Rachel Aviv deftly moves from first-person minor to first-person major in order to gauge firsthand Stephen Schneider’s innocence or lack thereof. She writes,

Schneider’s friends say that he was too trusting, a justification that I viewed with skepticism until Schneider began talking about the prison culture. “It’s surprising how nice these inmates are,” he told me. “It’s almost unbelievable, the camaraderie. People act like they’re in gangs, but I can’t say I ever felt I was in jeopardy. The blacks associate with whites, the whites with Mexicans.

And in his riveting “The Hunt for El Chapo,” Keefe’s low-key, reportorial first person becomes slightly more visible when he stops to comment on a curious facet of his narrative – Guzmán’s betrayal by two of his closest aides. Keefe writes,

I was impressed, initially, by the speed with which the marines had elicited leads from these subordinates, both of them ex-members of Mexico’s special forces who had been hardened by years in the cartel. One U.S. law-enforcement official told me that it is not unusual for cartel members to start coöperating as soon as they are captured. “There’s very little allegiance once they’re taken into custody,” he said.

But when I raised the subject with a former D.E.A. agent who has spoken to Mexican counterparts involved in the operation, he had a different explanation. “The marines tortured these guys,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “They would never have given it up, if not for that.”

Bhattacharjee, Aviv, and Keefe could’ve written wholly in the first-person minor, but their stories wouldn’t have been as effective. By artfully expanding their “I” ’s role, at crucial junctures, they personalize their reports, converting fact into experience.