Rachel Aviv’s latest, “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” should not be missed. In her book Strangers to Ourselves and in her many New Yorker pieces Aviv often explores how different-minded people experience the world, and her preternatural technique is to do so without pathologizing or psychologizing but just observing and accumulating fine details and contradictions until the subject’s way of being almost gleams. Here she takes the vexing question of how Alice Munro could create such powerful and emotionally perceptive works of fiction while also defending and living with the man (her second husband) who had raped and abused her daughter Andrea, starting when Andrea was nine. By the end of the piece, the contradiction has emulsified. And the reader’s understanding Munro’s work has been transformed.
Also: Aviv writes so strongly herself. I particularly love the way she ends to each section, with some detail or story or quoted dialogue that sets all that has come before to ringing.
Take, for one example, this section, which my partner had warned me about before I even read this piece. “Wait till you get to the section where she quotes Margaret Atwood,” she said. “It’s like a whole Margaret Atwood novel, in one paragraph.” And it is:
The writer Margaret Atwood, who had been friends with Alice since the late sixties, told me that she didn’t know about Andrea’s abuse, though she was aware that Alice had unexpectedly ended up in Comox. At the time, Atwood said, few men would put up with a middle-aged woman who was an accomplished writer. But Andrea’s revelation would have changed the power dynamics in the relationship. “After Alice found out,” Atwood wrote me, “she had the moral upper hand.” She now had an “ace-in-the-hole ‘You-have-been-a-bad-person’ card.” She added, “I’m not saying it’s a good thing—I’m just saying it’s a fact. For somebody of her generation who had been brought up to believe that women were lesser and that their opinions and feelings and desires did not count, it would be quite something.”
