Too Much Happiness KINDLE MOBI Alice Munro H.A.

Munro generally builds her stories around the "ordinary" (whatever that is!) lives of women. In Too Much Happiness (2009) she continues to frame her stories within the familiar surroundings of domesticity -- centred on mothers, daughters, cousins, aunts, female friendships. And while we find comfort in these spaces, Munro takes us, almost without effort, into the elements of what we might call "pulp fiction"--tales of unusual extremes that either destroy, lead to life altering consequences, or who's impact set their characters so far apart from others that their lives cycle into the endlessly in-contextual strange. The stories contained in Too Much Happiness tell of violence, cruelty, adultery -- even suicide and murder. Yet in Munro's skillful hands the thematic shock presents no climatic moment, more it becomes an event which, rather than over turn life or destroy character as we have learned to expect from such fiction -- it is integrated, it is made almost…for lack of a better world…."commonplace" (for who has not experienced trauma only to recover and find the rest of the world the same as it has always been, with the same obligations and the same necessary routines?).

Munro has sometimes been referred to as a modern "Chekhov". Like Anton Chekhov Munro here offers no moral finality, and --as did Chekhov -- Munro creates "lives submerged in text" and mood rather than circumstances and characters that we, as readers, can safely name, judge, and either morally admire or wish to see punished. And by placing her familiar domestic characters at the edge of the chasm of literary extremes, while still making them as relatable, as knowable, even as likeable as her earlier works, Munro proves that she is indeed as praise worthy of genius as Chekhov ever was.