You can order the book and determine for yourself if it’s worth the hype here.
Image Credit: Penguin Random House.
Being a raging nonconformist, I’m immediately skeptical of anything that has accrued heaps and heaps of praise. I went tentatively into Jesus’ Son after reading the 10+ rave reviews in the front cover of my book and I experienced lukewarm satisfaction that Denis Johnson’s stories did, in fact, flutter with humanity and excite me as critics promised they would. Alice Munro has an even more mythic presence in my imagination, having been recommended to me again and again, though this is the first time I’ve actually engaged with her work. I see what critics admire here, but I don’t think “This book deserves a prize” is a conclusion I would come to on my own. There is a magic here, as one of the excerpts says, but its magic lies in Munro’s startling ability to recreate the darkest, most unsettling corners of human existence— despite my inability to name this feeling, or even recall it vividly, Munro is able to write into the bittersweet, fearsome moments of clarity I experienced in childhood, and adolescence, and young adulthood. These were moments where I looked at my mom, or grandma, any of the women in my life, absorbing their sagging fleshiness, painfully aware of the shortcomings they could no longer see or had any mind to look for. These were very sharp moments of my life, where I saw what was coming for me, all the dignities and indignities that aging brings to every human lucky enough to have a normal lifespan, and all the dignities and indignities that “womanhood” heaps on as well. These moments terrified me when I was a girl. The Beggar Maid is a protracted exploration of these moments. And so, I must applaud her for surmounting one of the herculean tasks of artistic creation—replicating the ineffable— and calmly say goodbye to Flo, and Rose, and these other stuck characters gazing at their shoes and turn my attentions elsewhere.