When Alice Munro’s recent collection, The View from Castle Rock, appeared in 2006, some of its reviews had an intriguing echo of the critique Willa Cather received from Granville Hicks and Lionel Trilling in the 1930s. These two titans aimed gloves-off assessments at Cather even though she was arguably the leading American novelist of the 1920s. Hicks accused her of having “fallen into supine romanticism because of a refusal to examine life as it is.” Trilling wrote that it “has always been a personal failure of [Cather’s] talent that prevented her from involving her people in truly dramatic relations with each other.” Cather’s response, a feisty and pointed collection of essays titled Not Under Forty, did not prevent Hicks’s and Trilling’s critiques from having staying power: Cather’s art was familiar in the public mind and not, emphatically, what they felt was needed then.
This is similar to the reception given to The View from Castle...
Robert Thacker has been writing about Alice Munro since 1976. His critical biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, was published by McClelland and Stewart in 2005. He is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, near Ottawa.
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