Dear Life, like every new Alice Munro collection, is like returning for what will be a wonderful visit with a cherished, wise and quietly wicked good friend. Does it feel that way even if you are discovering Munro for the first time? I suspect it does, although for this reader, that firsthand feeling is now many books ago. This renewed visit with Munro is possibly my most cherished of all.

For good reason, it’s rare when an Alice Munro book gets something resembling an indifferent, much less a bad review. One smartypants sentence perhaps doesn’t count as a review of any ilk, but yes, trains and train schedules do appear a lot in this collection, and they literally and symbolically link the stories. Much of Dear Life is about arrivals and departures of all kinds and, with gentle perversity that characters often stoically withstand, how life’s moments and milestones don’t always materialize to an expected schedule.

Once again, with crisp but not heartless precision, Munro cultivates a rich undercurrent beneath every seemingly benign exterior. Sometimes, that undercurrent is more perceptible to the reader than the protagonist. However, that doesn’t make us love or admire any less the oblivious but resilient bride-to-be or the cheerfully determined woman who doesn’t know she’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s but acknowledges that others might be fighting it and should be accommodated accordingly and compassionately.

“She likes how the lattice provides a touch of fantasy. Public buildings have been changing in the past few years, just as private houses have. The relentless, charmless look – the only one permitted in her youth – has disappeared. Here she parks in front of a bright dome that has a look of welcome, of cheerful excess. Some people would find it fakey, she supposes, but isn’t it the very thing you would want? All that glass must cheer the spirits of the old people, or even, perhaps, of some people not so old but just off kilter.”

Leave it to Munro to save the most powerful impact for almost the last page. Whether you were convinced already or not, the eponymous story “Dear Life” (part of a “finale” sequence that Munro suggests is autobiographical) proves that those very words form not a placid, sentimental phrase, but are fused into something utterly urgent, even harsh, often hard won, always vital. Based on what might have been a misunderstanding, filtered and interpreted through the fog of years, mutual unstated grievances, tenuous memories, Munro believes that her mother once rescued her from strange but real danger:

“Perhaps that daughter, grown and distant, was the one she was looking for in the baby carriage. Just after my mother had grabbed me up, as she said, for dear life.”

Again, Munro’s deceptive economy of expression leaves a potent, moving, unforgettable impression. Let’s hope it’s not her last, but treasure it if it is.

See also:

• Recalling Lives Altered, in Ways Vivid and Untidy
  (The New York Times)
• Dear Life by Alice Munro – review
  Lauded Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro gives tantalising glimpses of her own life in this fine collection
  (The Guardian / The Observer)
• Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137
  Interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson
  (The Paris Review)

Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home opens with a careering, hands-off-the-steering-wheel plunge down a perilous road. You’re given little opportunity from the outset to catch your breath from there to the framing repetitions of this same ride towards the end of this slender, gripping novel.

The story’s chronology commences with the startling arrival of an interloper and the even more startling invitation to the interloper to stay, amidst a group of vividly unhappy vacationers sharing a villa on the French Riviera. That intruder, Kitty Finch, makes her entrance as a mistaken dead body in the villa swimming pool. She proceeds via wiles combining Edie Sedgwick, Sylvia Plath and a mermaid to seduce or unsettle all of poet Joe Jacobs, his war correspondent wife Isabel, their teenaged daughter Nina, the Jacobs’ guests Mitchell and Laura, villa house staff Jurgen and elderly villa neighbour Dr. Madeleine Sheridan.

That Kitty claims to be, among many things, a botanist – albeit one with a particular fascination for beautiful, poisonous plants – fits perversely well with the hothouse confluence of characters with relationship, financial, emotional and psychological problems, and problems relative in some cases to lack or excess of age and experience. She also claims to be a poet, obsessed with getting Jacobs to read one poem of hers that could hold something potent and revelatory for both of them – and how that is or isn’t revealed is also perverse.

For a book so lush in imagery – veering from plants and foliage to weaponry to water to real and toy animals – the overall effect of the book is still spare and spacious. There is much room to wonder what just happened and what will happen next between various troubled couplings and encounters, most of them provoked directly or indirectly by that maybe uninvited, maybe dangerously desired guest with the name combining predator and prey.

You won’t know until the very end if any of this largely unsympathetic but still fascinating cast of characters manage to swim home safely. As the story and voices linger long after you’ve finished this slim novel, you’ll continue to wonder if, in fact, you assessed correctly who did swim home … and even what is home, and if perhaps some found it instead by letting go and slipping under the surface.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing an advance copy of Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy.

See also:

September 20, 2012
Deborah Levy: ‘It’s a page-turner about sorrow’
Booker-nominated writer Deborah Levy talks to Kate Kellaway about her dazzling novel and why repression is more interesting than depression

Deborah Levy speaks to a Waterstones interviewer at Waterstones Piccadilly bookstore about her story, Black Vodka, and novel, Swimming Home.

NW is not Zadie Smith’s best. However, it shows a writer at her finest and bravest exploring diverse terrain and experimenting with different methods and vocabularies with which to present those explorations. That makes Smith’s examination of intersecting worlds and lives in the northwest corner of contemporary London a still fascinating if sometimes frustrating read.

NW focuses – as much as the intentionally disjointed storytelling and multiple narrative voices overlaid with a range of stylistic syncopations can be said to focus – on the lives of two women who have known each other since a fateful childhood encounter: red-haired Leah Hanwell, a charitable lottery administrator of Irish descent and Natalie Blake (who selectively abandons her birth name of Keisha), a lawyer of Jamaican descent. Both struggle and flirt with ambition, identity and personal reinvention against a backdrop of societal and economic changes happening, at times very literally, on their doorsteps.

Smith propels the story with varying degrees of success via a carousel of styles and formats from stream of consciousness narration to numbered and labelled lists and paragraphs to even a touch of concrete poetry. In the end, plotlines dangle or simply deflate. What endures for this reader is that the two central characters seem able to pick up their sometimes suspended conversations and relationship, and continue caring for each other through revelations, attempted transformations and missteps. The foundation of their friendship is grounded on a recognition of the essential persons under the layers of time and circumstance. Likewise, this reader will wait for and seek out this author’s future literary transformations, recognizing the essential craft and character at the foundation of whatever she attempts next.

See also:

NW by Zadie Smith – review
Adam Mars-Jones finds himself stumbling on the cracks in Zadie Smith’s new novel
The Guardian

Zadie Smith’s new novel is filled with voices from everywhere
by Lisa Moore
The Globe and Mail

Wielding deceptively simple, straightforward prose, Alix Ohlin draws us into the labyrinthine lives and emotions of a set of connected characters who spiral out and back on their own journeys in Inside. The book’s opening scene, where a woman skiing alone literally stumbles across a man who has failed to commit suicide in snowy seclusion, draws the reader in as swiftly and intimately as the characters’ unusual collision.

From that breathtaking start, Ohlin takes the reader through the complicated lives of Grace, a perhaps overly dedicated therapist; John, a traumatized former international aid worker; Annie, a troubled teenager turned aspiring actress; and Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband and a therapist himself who has worked in Canada’s Far North. As the overall story moves back and forth in time and from Montreal to Iqaluit to New York City to Hollywood to Rwanda, Ohlin maintains a steady hold on the characters and their intersecting paths, to offer the reader an enticingly, compulsively readable experience.

At the recent International Festival of Authors, Ohlin took part in a combined reading and group discussion with her fellow Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist nominees. (In this season of literary awards, Inside is also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.) In an elucidating exchange with discussion moderator Carol Off, Ohlin observed that Inside connects its characters through unanticipated acts of kindness. It’s a touching and potent way of encapsulating the entire book. Inside strikingly balances the precious gift of strangers reaching out to help strangers against the bittersweet conundrum of those nearest us and most beloved often being the greatest strangers and enigmas of all. This reader suspects that beautiful dilemma will continue to haunt and intrigue the most.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing a review copy of Inside, by Alix Ohlin.

See also:

• Alix Ohlin official web site

• On Not Letting Go: An Interview with Alix Ohlin (Fiction Writers Review)