"4.5 stars

Oh William! continues the story of Lucy Barton, following My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible. As in the previous works, Lucy’s narration is so deeply self-analytical that whatever she’s experiencing in the immediate moment inevitably initiates a cascade of memories and reflections, often going back to her impoverished childhood and its long-term effects upon her development (or lack of). While Lucy’s childhood bounces in and out of her thoughts, she directs her focus in Oh William! more tellingly on her later life, particularly on her two marriages as well as her relationships with her adult daughters. Events call for such reflections: Lucy’s second husband, David, has recently died; and her first husband (and father of her children), William, is now alone and reeling, his third wife having left him with their daughter in tow. Lucy has maintained a friendship with William, though at a pleasant enough distance; but with the dual crises, the two find themselves circling more directly around each other (William is particularly needy), their interactions bringing forth long buried feelings, secrets, recriminations, and, maybe, love.

Lucy’s directs her thoughts so much on William (and not David, her true love) not only because he is still around but because her marriage with David was much less complicated and fraught than hers with William. She and David were pretty much a happy, supportive couple, with problems of course occasionally surfacing but none so serious as to threaten the marriage’s well-being. Her marriage with William, on the other hand, was from the very beginning, at least for Lucy, based less on love than on the fulfillment of everyday needs and the soothing of social trepidations. In a revealing admission, Lucy says what she felt at her marriage ceremony—that “things were not entirely real,�� that “everything felt a little bit far away, . . . like I was removed from it”—never left her marriage and in fact in some ways came to define it. Having that feeling, she admits “was a terrible thing,�� and she describes just how terrible: “I could not describe it to him or even to myself, but it was a private quiet horror that sat beside me often, and at night in bed I could not be quite as I had once been with him, and I tried not to let him know this, but he knew of course, and when I think how I felt such despair those nights he did not reach for me before we were married, I can understand how he must have felt during our marriage: he must have felt humiliated and bewildered. And there seemed nothing to be done about it. And nothing could be done about it. Because I could not speak of it and William became less happy and he closed down in small ways. I could see that happen. And we lived our lives on top of this.��

This is not to put the failed marriage entirely on Lucy—William clearly has some serious flaws (including being unfaithful), and both he and Lucy are both fundamentally lonely souls who seem most committed—or married—to their professions (he’s a research scientist and professor, she a writer), though at one point Lucy declares she would in a heartbeat give up her success as a writer for “a family that was together and children who knew they were dearly loved by both their parents who stayed together and who loved each other.�� A friend to whom she tells this is not convinced. And indeed, it’s not entirely clear how much Lucy believes it herself, particularly when she notes immediately after making this claim that she feels it “sometimes,�� which of course suggests she might not think this way at other times. Such stepping back is typical of Lucy’s narration, as she frequently makes statements only immediately to qualify them with comments like “in my memory this was the way it was�� or “this is what it seemed like to me.��

Such qualification reflects both Lucy’s constant self-analysis as well as her oft-repeated assertion that it’s impossible to know not only what others are really thinking and feeling but also, at least in part, what one is. That makes for many surprises, both good and bad, and also goes far in expressing the wondrous mystery of life that is always catching Lucy unawares. "Oh William!," Lucy thinks at many points in the novel, astonished by some quirky thing he’s said or done. And at one point she also thinks this:

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! Too?
Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves?
Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.
But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are mysteries, is what I mean.
This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

This is Lucy at her best—and she’s mostly at her best in this astonishingly thoughtful and moving novel."

"Did not disappoint. It’s not going to change your life, but it’s fun, and I will read whatever is next. "

"I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to read Alice Munroe. I’ve long known about her work and have friends who deeply admire her writing. It was only on a whim, when I saw this book displayed on a shelf at my public library of “The Best Books of the 21st Century�� (apparently from a list in the New York Times), that I checked it out and immediately read it. What a wonder, what a collection! What a fabulous writer! I was completely drawn in from the first page of the first story.

At first glance, it’s not easy to characterize Munroe’s fiction, as so little happens—outwardly, that is. But inwardly—in the fraught and rich inner life of her characters—so much is at play, even in those whose lives seem otherwise staid if mind-numbly routine. For all of Munroe’s protagonists the world is always pressing in, as are ever-circulating memories that the characters are continually revising, recalibrating, and reinterpreting in response to the continuous pressures of daily life. My GR friend Teresa made an insightful comment on one of the stories from the collection, observing that “life is not one big epiphany (like some short stories make it seem), but a series of mini-epiphanies, not all of which will stick, most having only that momentary effect, but even that helps with life’s rough spots.�� That is indeed the case for some of Munroe’s characters, but some others do in fact gain more transformative, epiphanic insight into their lives, typically after an upheaval that shatters their everyday stability and self-understanding.

Munroe works slowly and meticulously, in wondrous prose, to reveal the complexities of her characters�� lives. Of all the writers I know, she reminds me most of Eudora Welty and Anton Chekhov, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Richard Ford. She’s an absolute master, as are those with whom I’ve grouped her. "