Analysis exercise, Alice Munro

Retyping, an exercise in noticing how a writer writes. Today, I'll retype a passage from Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's "Free Radicals," which was published in "The New Yorker" in February 2008, then analyze it.

This was the cover of the edition it was in.
I love "The New Yorker."

At first, people kept phoning, to make sure that Nita was not too depressed, not too lonely, not eating too little or drinking too much. (She had been such a diligent wine drinker that many forgot that she was now forbidden to drink at all.) She held them off, without sounding nobly grief-stricken or unnaturally cheerful or absent-minded or confused. She said that she didn't need groceries; she was working through what she had on hand. She had enough of her prescription pills and enough stamps for her thank-you notes.

Her closer friends probably suspected the truth--that she was not bothering to eat much and that she threw out any sympathy note she happened to get. She had not even informed the people who lived at a distance, to elicit such notes. Not Rich's ex-wife in Arizona or his semi-estranged brother in Nova Scotia, though those two might have understood, perhaps better than the people near at hand, why she had proceeded with the non-funeral as she had done.

Rich had told her that he was going to the village, to the hardware store. It was around ten o'clock in the morning, and he had just started to paint the railing of the deck. That is, he'd been scraping it to prepare for the painting, and the old scraper had come apart in his hand.

She hadn't had time to wonder about his being late. He'd died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood in front of the hardware store offering a discount on lawnmowers. He hadn't even managed to get into the store. He'd been eighty-one years old and in fine health, aside from some deafness in his right ear. His doctors had checked him over only the week before. Nita was to learn that the recent checkup, the clean bill of health, cropped up in a surprising number of the sudden-death stories that she was now presented with. "You'd almost think that such visits ought to be avoided," she'd said.

If you want to read the full thing, you can, for free, here.

Here is what I noticed. First were the lists in that first paragraph. I could just imagine those phone calls, with people on the phone not knowing what to say. How are you? She gives a short answer. I'd understand if you're depressed, they say. No, I'm fine, thank you, she replies. Would you like some company? I'm sure you're lonely. No, I'm fine, thank you. Et cetera. Awkward conversations on both sides, the sort of conversation that ends in a sigh of relief for them, that they did their duty of reaching out to her, and a sigh of relief for her that they've finally hung up to leave her alone. The use of a list also makes it feel like everyone asks the same set of questions, and she could almost check them off on her fingers as the conversation goes on.

I also noticed the repetition of "too." They obviously expect her to be depressed, lonely, etc., but just want to make sure it isn't serious. Is she fine enough that they don't have to do anything to help? It is as if they are essentially checking to make sure she doesn't commit suicide.

This image went with the story online.
It's attributed to Sam Weber.

Also, the use of the "At first" that the story starts with--it shows that people were interested right after the death, but soon turned their attention to other things (a problem I think we all have, sadly). The phone calls stopped or changed in content before too (haha) long.

As for the "drinking too much" bit, it illustrated, before Munro spelled it out, that these people barely paid attention to her before the death. They didn't know her or care enough to remember that she doesn't drink at all. I'm sure the switch from drinking often to not at all was a life event for her and those people who were truly in her life would have known about it and remembered.

The second list is her list: Don't sound grief-stricken. Don't sound unnaturally cheerful. Don't sound absent-minded or confused. She must be a self-conscious woman who cares about the impression she gives to others. Or she doesn't want to do anything to make them concerned and stay on the line (which is more likely).

Oh, and the "held them off" is a nice touch.

After a public view in the first paragraph, we zoom in to see her actual friends. We get a view of what is actually happening, and we learn her husband's name. I had assumed from the first paragraph that her husband had died, mainly because she was apparently living alone, she was old, and something tragic had happened to her. This is the paragraph where we definitively learn there was a "non-funeral." That comes right after learning she didn't tell the non-family members (telling us she and her husband didn't have much by way of true family, but had lived alone). If they had had true family members, they would have been mentioned in this paragraph.

By the third and fourth paragraphs, we zoom in enough to see what had actually happened. Note the details used, things that symbolically mean little but add reality to the event: He was scraping old paint off the deck when he went to the hardware store and died by a sign out front that was trying to sell lawnmowers. This is not a death she has romanticized at all (a common trait in contemporary fiction).

This may seem like a small detail, but she wrote out "ten o'clock in the morning." There are so many ways to show the time, from the newspaper's "10 a.m." to "10:00 a.m." or "ten in the morning." Contemporarily, people will even just write "10." But no, it's written out here. I'm not sure if that is because of "The New Yorker's" style, but even if it is, writing it out longhand points to her age and temperament. She isn't so anal or grief-stricken as to know the exact minute, or even to know if it was 10:30. She writes out "in the morning," which is not the utilitarian "a.m." and is reminiscent of an older style. People rarely even say "o'clock" anymore, have you noticed?

In a nod to possible symbolism, the old scraper had "come apart in his hand." Practically, it could mean he was having a hard time with the scraping because he's in his 80s. It could also be that the scraper was just old and gave out--like he did.

In that final paragraph I gave you, I love the detail that now everyone is telling her sudden-death stories. This is exactly what happened to me when I last visited my grandma's cousin, who lives near me. I visited to tell her that her brother had died, and at some point in that visit she started telling me stories about how people in our family have a history of simply dropping dead. It was mildly concerning.

I'm sure that people were telling Nita stories about other deaths because they were trying to show they understood. I've noticed that when someone says x happened to them, the people around them start chirping in about how they've had the same experience, except this was how it was different. It must have something to do with a sense of community.

Last comment on the story: "You'd almost think that such visits ought to avoided," Nita says. "Visits" could mean either visits to the doctor or visits to people in mourning. Munro did a nice job of using one word to say two things at once.

I share this analysis for two reasons. 1) It was a good exercise for my reading skills. 2) If you read enough analyses like this, you should be able to do the same thing, and that should improve your writing. Try doing analyses yourself sometime. You'll read more out of what you read.