Vandals by Alice Munro, 1993
The magic trick:
Turning your own failings as a mother into art as a way to continue avoiding personal growth
All right, so here we are. The reckoning we never expected to reckon with.
Alice Munro, beloved master of the short story form, the only truly worthy modern heir to Chekhov, champion of the lives of girls and women, was … not who we thought she was?
I don’t even know how to describe the news that broke about a month ago, let alone how to process it. Munro, who died at 93 in May, turns out to have harbored a family secret for decades. It’s all here in this article. Her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, went public only now to say that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin (Munro’s second husband), sexually abused and harassed her when she was just 9 years old. This was back in 1976. Sixteen years later, as an adult, she told her mother about it. Munro’s reaction, evidently, was to leave her husband for four months, think things over, and then return to him despite it all. They remained together for 20 more years until his death. (Even after his response two decades later was essentially “the kid was asking for it!” which is almost the most egregiously inhuman detail in this entire story to me, but anyway…)
Munro’s daughter and her siblings, meanwhile, stayed quiet. For the most part at least. Perhaps the strangest part of this is that Fremlin was actually charged and found guilty of indecent assault in 2005. Somehow, this wasn’t covered by any media or even Munro’s biographer and essentially remained unknown all this time. Honestly, it’s all the kind of thing that you’d only expect to find in an Alice Munro short story. There’s irony there, until you think about it more and realize that it might not be irony at all. It might, in fact, be very, very telling.
The whole story is incredibly sad from any number of angles – most notably, obviously, for Skinner herself who has been forced to silently endure this trauma so that ostensibly she could protect the very woman who would not protect her.
Just awful.
So now what are we supposed to do with this as readers; as Alice Munro devotees? Constance Grady wrote a remarkable essay about this, saying many things that I was starting to piece together in my brain without quite being able to articulate. Grady also looks at a couple of Munro stories that specifically take on an entirely new light given this horrible news – 1977’s “Wild Swans” and today’s SSMT feature, “Vandals.”
“Vandals,” published just a year after Skinner told her mother about the sexual abuse, tells the story of a woman returning as a young adult to trash the house of a couple who sexually abused (the husband) her and looked the other way (the wife) when she was a child.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this, going in. So-called cancel culture is such a strange thing. And very astute SSMT readers will note I have not read or written up another story by either of Junot Diaz or Sherman Alexie since receiving news of their abusive relationships and actions. Why is that? What is the calculus for such reactions? Well, it’s complicated.
Artists inherently are complicated at best, broken human beings more often. If they were perfectly well-adjusted souls, they likely wouldn’t have the need to create art. I’m sure of that. And so I hope it’s not too cynical to say, a lot of artists who create a lot of art that you love are assuredly awful, selfish, hurtful people; you just haven’t heard about their misdeeds … yet. There’s a happy thought.
So how is it that I’ve stopped reading Alexie but I’m fine with Hemingway or Roth? Is there some kind of internal justice system I’m meting out in my brain? Yes, I think we all do that, as gross as it seems to play the game of comparing different people’s pain and deciding which is cancel-able and which isn’t. For me, I think it really comes down to the art. Alexie and Diaz seem to me to be writing from a moral high ground in which it’s assumed that they and we understand that such behavior they were guilty of is not just wrong but something that someone else is doing. That’s such a complicated thought and not at all well-stated by me there. It’s frustrating to not quite be able to put my finger on what I mean. Maybe what I mean is the nature of their actions seems to me to disqualify them from being people I am interested in hearing from when it comes to relationships or human connection. If Diaz had been found guilty of murder, I’m not sure I would care at all. I’d be fine reading his works. Murder doesn’t change the way I hear him write about men pursuing women in relationships. Finding out that he has preyed on young women through relationships does change how I read his writing on such topics. No longer reading his work is not a punishment I’m handing down. It’s simply a choice to reject his authority on the subject matter of which he typically writes. I’m no longer interested. He’s been revealed as a fraud.
Now then, we have Munro and today’s SSMT feature, “Vandals.” I thought that perhaps this new awareness of Munro’s personal life – and failings as a mother – might add new depth to her work for me, odd as it is to say that. However, it did not. At least not in “Vandals,” which to this point is the only Munro story I’ve read since I heard this news.
Frankly, it was hard to read – beyond just the difficult subject matter. I found it pretty gross, to be honest, the way Munro redrew the story of her own daughter’ trauma and fit it into her usual mode of story blocks across spans of time. I expected to be intrigued by seeing Munro work out her own feelings of guilt and hurt on the page. But that’s not what I saw. I didn’t see introspection. I didn’t see exploration. I just saw a set of flat ideas and overly simplistic cause-and-effects. I saw a robust character portrait of the sexual abuser character that if not quite sympathetic at least makes the case that he’s “complicated.” I saw little to no interest in interrogating the effects of the abuse victim’s feelings or after-effects.
What’s worse, it made me look at Munro’s entire body of work and see the same things. It’s like where she was flying before, I now see the strings. Suddenly I’m only seeing the distanced third-person narration that keeps the author’s hands clean. I’m only feeling that sense of biographical fatalism about the way the story’s incidents connect over lifetimes – which removes a ton of accountability or even agency for most of the characters.
It’s not exactly Woody Allen levels of “No, no, look, this is acceptable, right? This is how everyone lives, right?” normalizing of sin in art. But it’s not that far off! Similar to Allen, it’s as if she’s been telling us who she was the whole time in her work. Life just happens to people in Munro stories. It’s sad and sometimes even tragic, but it’s nothing to do with us. We don’t have agency. We can’t be held accountable. It’s just fate.
Hmmmm.
Was Munro simply playing god in these little biographies of girls and women all these years just make herself feel better about not doing the hard work of holding people accountable and giving selfless love?
Yeah, maybe she was. Probably she was. It goes back to the idea that artists create art out of something lacking in their everyday lives or abilities as socially normative humans. It’s a tragedy for all involved.
I won’t stop reading Munro as a punishment for her. I won’t stop reading Munro as a show of support for her daughter. That’s just not how I approach the entire cancel culture situation. But I have to say, if my reading experience with “Vandals” is a preview, I may someday stop reading Munro because the work simply has ceased feeling like a magic trick.
Short Story Magic Tricks 