The Reading Method of Monroe's Novels

In an interesting review of her own novel, Alice Munro claims that she doesn't always read stories from beginning to end, but can start from anywhere and move in any direction. The story is not like a path to follow... it's more like a house. You enter it, stay inside for a period of time, wander back and forth, land casually, explore how rooms and corridors are interconnected, and how the scenery changes when looking out of the window at the outside world... You can go back and forth, and this house, this story, will always be more than the last time you see it. It also has a strong sense of self-awareness, built for its own necessity, not just to shelter or attract you

Monroe's metaphor of "a story like a house" reminds people of the novel house "with countless windows" in Henry James' works. But unlike James who emphasizes the author's active observation perspective, Monroe focuses more on characters being unexpectedly penetrated by fate without any defense. She is good at writing a seemingly familiar life, which cracks an unfathomable gap in a moment. Even the most mundane life may encounter "disruptive events" that open windows and expose untimely scenes (Simon's Luck).

She presents this mutation through the technique of "narrative interruption": it appears to be everyday, but beneath it lies a torrent of emotions or a reassembly of identity. She is not in a hurry to reveal the truth, but rather allows the character to slowly realize in hesitation, sinking into the unease of 'I may have been wrong all along'. As in 'Who Do You Think You Are?', Ruth looks back on her life, always worried that she has missed out on deeper tones and meanings.

In addition, Monroe is more concerned with the correlation between the internal structure of the "house" rather than the scenery peeking out. Her stories often resemble a psychological map of consciousness, breaking the traditional unity of short stories and not relying on linear plot progression, but unfolding through jumps and associations. As she mentioned in the interview, she wanted to tell a story about someone's "what happened," but presented it through interruptions, twists, and strangeness, allowing readers to feel not "what happened," but "how it happened.

In Monroe's works, the past, present, and potential future of characters often coexist within a paragraph or even a sentence. Reading her works requires a different attitude from reading novels: not anticipating the moment of climax and ending, but immersing oneself in the dispersion of time and the subtle vibrations of emotions. Her preference for "non-linearity" actually aligns with modern psychology's understanding of memory and trauma: recall is not a single line, but a multidimensional experience triggered by repetition, jumping, and chance. This may explain why her stories, although short, always have a thickness of "compressed fiction" - because they carry not the progression of the plot, but the expansion of consciousness and the concentration of life experience.

So, there is something extraordinary about Monroe's most outstanding novels, which is that they will eventually slowly attract you. If they haven't provided you with shelter, it's because they are busy settling down in your body. If readers are willing to provide them with a good 'address', what they will give back will not only be companionship, not only the pleasure of reading, but also a deeper understanding of the mysteries of life.

However, after reviewing Monroe's complete works, Christian Lorentzen, the editor of the London Review of Books, came up with an almost anxious reaction:

After reading her collection of ten novels in a row, I didn't feel any admiration for her brilliance, but entered a state of mental numbness that even spread to my daily life. I became sad, like the characters in her works, and increasingly sad. I began to become sensitive to the shabby and dirty aspects of life - these two words repeatedly appear in her novels - and paid more attention to people's residential and family history, which she never skipped

But perhaps the problem lies not in Monroe's work itself, but in the "wild reading" approach we adopt towards it. Monroe's collection of novels should not be read in one breath, and her short stories were not written for linear reading. They are more suitable for being "visited", "casually shuttled between", "slowly explored", and even "repeatedly echoed in memory".

Life disappears, a common disaster

If you master the correct pronunciation of Monroe, what kind of mysteries of life will you discover?

Firstly, life is layered.

In her early work "Lives of Girls and Women" (1971), there was a writer character named Del Jordan, who many critics believed was the incarnation of Monroe. In the book, Monroe depicts Jordan's grand ambition for writing: she yearns to write down all the details, feelings, and illusions, to freeze everything into eternity.

As Jordan said, Monroe's novel writing method is rooted in the process of gradual disclosure. She approached a rough emotional truth by peeling it apart layer by layer. Writers understand the layering of life: the passage of time does not form a convenient linear shape in a neat and uniform manner, but rather accumulates like parchment, sometimes semi transparent, containing revisions of ideas and opinions, and these layers are interrelated. As mentioned earlier, this non-linear approach imitates the operation of thinking and memory, and also fits the vague experience of life.

In The Progress of Love (1985), a recurring image is the layered wallpaper in the narrator's childhood home - pasted, torn off, and covered again. Monroe suggests that we should view the family as a 'palimpsest'. But this is not just an overlap of memories, but also a fictional interweaving - multiple versions of the same event are contradictory and difficult to reconcile. Sex, shame, love, and the intricate power relationship between husband and wife, mother and daughter, and sisters... all these elements are intertwined, and they refuse to be sorted into order in a chaotic and stubborn way.

Who is right? Who is wrong? According to Monroe's usual maddening yet captivating style, these questions have no clear answers. There are only more overlapping stories, layer after layer.

Secondly, life is strange.

Monroe never attempts to imbue everyday life with transcendent meaning, but instead focuses on capturing the mystery within appearances. She admitted that she is not a knowledge writer, but she has a strong sense of the "surface of life", and those details, tones, and textures are almost religiously important to her.

In "The Cowboys of the Walker Brothers," the girl discovers her father's secret love in the past, and the familiar scenery suddenly transforms in her eyes, as if enchanted - the familiar things become distant and difficult to understand. This kind of transformation is a common strange moment in Monroe's works: the world has not changed, and we suddenly see its hidden face.

Monroe believed that the most real mysteries of the world do not lie in transcendence, but in hiding within the most ordinary facts. Her most explicit expression of the theme and paradoxical perspective of her works appears in "The Lives of Girls and Women," which aptly summarizes the living conditions of her characters: "Monotonic, simple, astonishing, and unfathomable - deep caves covered with kitchen oil blankets

So, when reading Monroe's novels, we first see the surface, the ordinary, worn piece of felt on the floor, but beneath that seemingly harmless, everyday felt, there are many deep caves that we are invited to explore. The current controversy surrounding Monroe is like we have entered that deep hole hidden under the oil felt, but we don't know where to go or how to find a way out.

However, Monroe would say, "It seems that you always have to pay attention to the surface, and the large and unsettling things hidden behind will take care of themselves." (See Monroe's autobiographical essay "What Do You Want to Know For?")? In 2006, Monroe's focus on the "surface" formed her aesthetic and even religious views. Her writing invites readers to contemplate the vast and mysterious realms behind the surface of life on their own.

Once again, life implies the everyday nature of tragedy.

In Wood (1980), a man named Roy is chopping down a tree when he accidentally steps into a hole. At the moment when he was about to fall and break his leg, Monroe wrote, "What happened to Roy at this moment is the most ordinary, but also the most incredible

Monroe is extremely skilled at telling a chilling story in a casual language. In "Simon's Luck," it is mentioned that in the 1940s, on a farm in the mountains of Provence, the way people lived and cultivated seemed to be medieval: "My grandmother was locked in a small house in a barn and fed two meals a day

Many of her most brilliant and unforgettable works are about the moments when explosives only briefly lose their fuse, the elegance of those moments - when a momentary intuition or a stroke of good luck quietly pulls the protagonist back from the brink of disaster. These moments include: the moment when a child could have drowned but survived (Miles City, Montana, 1985); A turning point where seemingly imminent violence is invisibly resolved (Run away, 2003) - until the storm cloud quietly brushes past and moves elsewhere.

This also explains why many loyal readers of Monroe are women. Isn't this the norm for many women throughout their lives? Continuously and inevitably, remain alert to potential disasters. If the disaster ultimately did not occur, men may say: those worries are just neurotic. But that was a judgment made from the perspective of the danger that had already passed. The true female experience is being forced to live in a tension that can happen at any time - that tension that defines their entire life.

In 'Fiction' (included in 'Happiness Overruns'), TooMuchHappiness, In 2009, Monroe wrote lightly, "Her life disappeared. It was a common disaster

Tragedy is so common among crowds - it only appears unbelievable when it strikes itself. Monroe makes this seem so simple that it's almost confusing. She calmly and accurately analyzed the boundary between "ordinary" and "incredible" like a surgeon. She showed us that life is a series of moments that may embrace us or betray us, sudden shocks that will last for a long time and go far - we have to rearrange our days time and time again until one day we die.

Wounds, fissures, and abysses

So, Monroe's works are not just a collection of short stories, but more like a profound album of life, echoing fragments of memories, residual pain of wounds, and the stitches left by time in repairing the cracks of life. These stories focus not on grand events, but on the cracks and undercurrents that quietly occur in daily life but can shake the soul. She revealed the flaws of life, especially the oppression of women, while also revealing the darkness, cowardice, and distortion of human nature.

Let's take a look at how Monroe captures Bea's complex obsession with Ladner in Vandals (1993) - even though she knows he's not a good person from the beginning. Bi asked herself, 'If living with a man is not living in his madness, then what is it?' This is a sentence pattern that Monroe excels at, which both astonishingly illuminates the character's situation and deeply insight into certain terrifying traits in interpersonal relationships.

Due to these characteristics of life itself, reading Monroe often draws attention to the repeated appearance of people covered in cracks and repairs in her novels. Just like the female protagonist who experienced loss and hopeless love in Carrie Daway (1991): "Is she the kind of person whose whole body has been repaired and cracked, and you can only see it when you get close? What kind of old wounds are troubling her?" Hidden wounds - whether they are loss, trauma, or rejection due to being out of place - will leave traces, disrupt order, and sow emotions. No wounds leave no scars.

In contemporary expression, 'emotion' is often understood as a subtle yet powerful encounter that occurs in the smallest and most ordinary moments of everyday life. As philosopher Lyotard interpreted Benjamin's words, childhood memories are not a retrospective of events, but rather an engraving of those 'uncaptured things'. These viewpoints also provide a pathway for us to understand the perceptions and traumas lurking deep in daily life in Monroe's works.

This also applies to Monroe's "childhood stories" and even "teenage stories". Wounds in these works are not only traces of pain, but also trigger points for memories and emotions. In Train (2012), the protagonist is not facing external wars or disasters, but rather the breakdown of emotional bonds and the drifting of identity; In Gravel (2011), it is the unspoken loss and betrayal between a mother and daughter that constitute the psychological trauma. Regardless of gender, as they enter adulthood with these wounds, cracks are ubiquitous in their life relationships and self-awareness.

These cracks are not immediately apparent. Only when we truly approach the lives of characters and uncover the surface of daily life like archaeology, can we see the hidden and concealed cracks. Some cracks have been stitched together, while others have become permanent hidden pains. Monroe did not attempt to smooth out these cracks, but rather quietly described the way they existed.

In Corrie (2010), when she suddenly realized that she had unintentionally paid a price for her lover's companionship in a relationship that lasted for more than twenty years, she felt a space-time hole in her heart: "There is a hole everywhere, and the most obvious one is in her chest." Similarly, in Amundsen (2012), the female protagonist is abandoned on her wedding day, and the disintegration of the subject is depicted as a "skinning" experience. She became naked, losing her symbolic armor, protective skin, and self-awareness: 'Every turn was like cutting a piece from the rest of my life.'

The crack widens and eventually becomes the 'abyss'. It is not an obvious destruction, but a deep unease and emptiness hidden beneath the surface calm life. In Miles City, Montana, Monroe reveals the sense of abyss brought about by the fragility of life through two periods of mismatched experiences. During her childhood, the narrator witnessed a drowning accident and the resulting funeral, and she instinctively felt repulsed by the way adults used rituals to whitewash death. Twenty years later, while traveling with her young daughter, a seemingly ordinary swimming experience startled her: even if nothing happens, the possibility of fear and disaster still pierces the surface of life like an electric shock. This unease is not the event itself, but the feeling that the event "could happen" - a horror deeply buried in daily life. In this electric shock like experience, there is no trace of "security" left. The whole story becomes an outstanding example of counterpoint: Monroe juxtaposes two events - one child drowning and the other surviving - and tells them twenty years apart. It is in this contrast that the fragility, contingency, and unsolvable nature of life are magnified and gazed upon.

In the end, the narrator agrees with all parties involved. She is the parent who imagines the death of her youngest child and realizes that she has reached a reconciliation with death in some sense; She was also that child who angrily condemned the adults' attitude of "reconciling with death". As she witnessed with her own eyes, her child will one day treat her the same way.

So we continued on, and the two children in the back seat trusted us because we had no other choice, while we ourselves believed in this: the things that our children would notice and condemn at the beginning would eventually be forgiven. "The story ends like this.

The greatness of Monroe lies not in providing answers to pain and healing, but in her faithful recording of how life continues through cracks, bleeds in silence, and hides turbulence in what appears ordinary. Life is full of cracks and repairs, and writing is the gaze and naming of these cracks.

Is it possible to repair

The theme repeatedly written by Monroe is the extraordinary "encounters" in daily life - seemingly ordinary moments that later reveal their tearing power. The true 'event' is not characterized by novelty, but rather by opening the gap in perception, making people recall it repeatedly in the future. Psychoanalysis also points out that trauma is often delayed in perception, and when those moments occur, we 'do not truly exist'. Monroe's narrative structure embodies this characteristic: she infuses denial into the narrative, writing about the suppressed yet enduring pain and shame at the edge of life.

In the summer of 2024, as I reread some of Monroe's works with the raging anger I had seen in the media and social networks, I was once worried that I would find them like a "semi formed confession" - full of deformities, imbalances, and chaos caused by sadness, as writer Rebecca Markkai put it. On the contrary, I was impressed by their shocking calmness. In the works created by Monroe after learning that her daughter had been victimized, she seemed to suppress her fear and disgust with an almost cruel will.

In 2002, Andrea Robin Skinner, the victim of child sexual abuse by her stepfather and Monroe's youngest daughter, decided to sever all ties with her mother Monroe, who was the perpetrator of the crime. Two years later, Monroe completed a trilogy that tells the story of a woman named Juliet. In this series of works, Monroe interspersed many details, implying that Juliet was not a perfect mother - the final one, titled "Silence" (Si lens, 2004), expresses Juliet's doubts and guilt.

Juliet was once a respected public figure, but now she has retreated to a private life and can only rely on an unsigned birthday card every year to perceive her daughter's presence - until one year, the card is no longer sent.

Monroe did not arrange a final settlement for this mother daughter relationship, but instead let the story linger in Juliet's pain and self blame. She guessed alone, "I'm useless to Penelope. Either she can't stand me anymore." She still hoped to receive a letter, but also learned not to expect too much, "just like a more worldly wise person waiting for irrational thoughts, natural recovery, or such good things, just with hope

This whole story, perhaps not previously considered autobiographical, has now been restructured. Monroe undoubtedly struggles with his sense of conspiracy here. The whole story is filled with pain: from Juliet's resentment and evaluation of her daughter's acceptance of the "spiritual" faith, to the loneliness and denial she experiences as an elderly person with declining fame. Monroe seems to have forgiven Juliet on one hand, exonerating her from her complex foolishness and contradictions; On the other hand, she was criticized, revealing her self centeredness and cowardice. When discussing her daughter's estrangement with her friends, she said:

In fact, I haven't done anything particularly outrageous, "Juliet's mood improved." Why do I always self blame and think it's my fault? What's incomprehensible is her, that's how things are. I have to face this

It's a mystery, and it's also a cold fish, "she said again, as if drawing a conclusion.

No, "Krista said.

No, "Juliet said," no - it's not really like that

She ultimately refused to blame herself for her daughter's departure and did not truly take responsibility for it.

Monroe's final work, "Dear Life," ends with guilt towards his mother. She admitted that if she had chosen to stay and take care of her mother back then, she would not have become the writer she is today. In the final chapter, she wrote, "We may talk about things that cannot be forgiven... but we forgive - we have always forgiven." This seemingly comforting sentence now reads as if it also points to the unhealed rift between her and her daughter.

In Monroe's works, there are often "women in the process of repair" who forgive each other and themselves - but this forgiveness is often a purgatory after compromise. In reality, the repair took place in the place where she was absent: her daughter Andrea and her brothers and sisters faced the trauma together and reestablished their relationship. Monroe wrote himself into the story, but could not write himself into the restoration.

As readers, can we repair our relationship with Monroe? We have expressed loyalty to Monroe, which is an artistic intimacy and a connection. Losing this connection is painful. For some people, this may mean they can no longer read Monroe. Just like in real life, when we are hurt by our loved ones, sometimes the answer is: we cannot repair it.

But if repair is possible, as Andrea said, its premise is that Monroe's works can no longer be read without realizing her failure as a 'person'. Reading is not an act of worship, nor is it a way to express solidarity. The books on our bookshelf will not make us better or worse; We are determined by the choices we make in life, including the perspectives and awareness we bring into reading. As a reader, learning from a story written by a flawed person and fighting against her flaws does not necessarily mean conspiring or perpetuating her mistakes. Refusing to have a relationship with the author's work solely because of their flaws is a response centered around the reader's own victim identity.

Monroe's novels cannot provide answers to her own moral failures. But art is never a purifying bath, readers can bathe in it and attain sanctification. The world is what it is, art only allows us to glimpse that way.

At present, reading Monroe requires a dual perspective: both confronting those cruel wounds and striving to understand the possible forms of repair. In my opinion, this may be the "sewing tool" that we should bring into reading - even if the movements are clumsy, slow, and we are still exploring, we should not easily shelve our own "sewing kit".