Lives of Girls and Women – Alice Munro

      First Published in 1971, this work has the, “at-once” distinguishing identification, of being labeled  a novel on its cover. The main character (Del ) whom we travel this narration with, from  a girl of ten or eleven years  –to an adolescent,  to her womanhood, is the pair of eyes we look at Jubilee with ( As most of Munro’s  work, it is based in Jubilee.)   Although labeled a novel, it is rather a collection of short stories – some not concerning Del or her family or relatives; other  concerning backward fox farmers; yet some concerning her immediate family, like her mother and her ambitions ; also focused is her adolescence ; her first experience with love ; her bout of academic ambitions, its fall and her discovery of sex. In these seven stories, which appear simple narrations on surface, show us,  the reader, the difficulty of getting away from an environment which inhibits you with its ways; how even after a generation, the fate that befell the mother could possibly come back to haunt the  daughter, even twenty years after, when the same factors, the same environment,  haunts to bring one down, not with standing how determined one is. Success is relative when viewed from the  eyes of the town, with the more ambitious being looked down upon. This is what ambition looks like for the average Jubilee resident:

"ambition was what they were alarmed by, for to be ambitious was to court failure and to risk making a fool of oneself. The worst thing, I gathered, the the worse thing that could happen in this life was to have people laughing at you."

 The timid  have a concealed grudge against the ambitious. The lives of the backward too is displayed in all its simplicity for better and worse. It is also a fascinating thing how the various Christian churches look at each other in a climate, where it is the main differentiating factor in a neighbourhood of people comprising of the same upbringing, same education levels ( broadly ) and same values and beliefs.

By the completion of this “novel”, or the various collection of tales as told by Del, the only single string which travel right through the novel, is the picture of Jubilee subtly  created inside the author’s mind. Only someone as devoted to ambition, with the family backing him like Jerry Storey's did, could

break away from the invisible chains that the town hold you with. The fact that Bobby Sheriff actually went to University but couldn’t still successfully complete it due to medical reasons, stresses the bleak picture of the  overall narration, which hints on how Jubilee bogs people down. The fact that Del’s bout of Love, does nothing but destroy her chances of higher of education, with some detail on what transpires on the eve of her exams, all suggest the general silent distress of the place.

Munro, has written a collection of related tales, to form a whole that says a lot about a rather small backward town, with its eccentricities, its accepted ways of life, and what is a rebel in the general view of Jubilee, and what courage and determination, not to mention fortune is needed for one to escape from Jubilee. Yet  the obstacles are almost co-incidental - other than for the fact it is not. There is a way of life, way of belief here, that stagnates the place. And Munro has written a well nuanced narration, which is both  charming, and yet distressing. The skill of the authoress, is that the reader keeps looking forward for the subtle grief that pores out of the whole work, which builds its  whole atmosphere.  Not withstanding the label “novel”, to me it is more inclined towards the “short stories” category.