Alice Munro’s Vancouver

David Laskin

In Alice Munro’s Vancouver nobody eats sushi. Nobody jogs along the seawall or browses Granville Street galleries or shops for organic herbs at the Granville Island market. Munro, the eighty-five-year-old Canadian whom the novelist Jonathan Franzen dubbed “the best fiction writer now working in North America,” set a handful of her marvelous short stories in the damp British Columbian metropolis, and the urban geography is so exact you can practically map the city off her fictions. But though the addresses match, the vibe is unrecognizable. Young but hopelessly uncool, lustful without being sexy, dowdy, white, yet blind to its own staggering beauty, Munro’s Vancouver is an outpost where new wives blink through the rain and wonder when their real lives are going to begin.

Which is pretty much what Munro herself was doing when she came here as a bride of twenty. A small-town beauty from a poor southern Ontario family, Munro moved reluctantly to Vancouver in 1952 after her husband, Jim, landed a job in a big downtown department store. She brought with her two years of university education and a few published stories, a perfect 1950s cinched-waist figure, and a fierce sense of irony that she kept carefully hidden.

Alice and Jim moved into the dark downstairs of a three-story rental on Arbutus Street right across from the beach in the Kitsilano neighborhood. The building, No. 1316, is still there, in need of a paint job, on a street of “high wooden houses crammed with people living tight.” Cross the street, stroll out on the packed sand, and the brooding immensity of Burrard Inlet and the coastal mountains engulfs you; a ten-minute drive across the Burrard Bridge and you’re cruising through downtown’s smorgasbord of world cuisine and high-end retail. Yet Kitsilano seems blithely unaware of its world-class setting.

“Winter in Vancouver was not like any winter I had ever known,” Munro writes in “Cortes Island,” a story in her 1998 collection The Love of a Good Woman that matches detail for detail with her first months in Kits. “No snow, not even anything much in the way of a cold wind.” After a day of wandering the city vaguely looking for work, the story’s nameless narrator (dubbed “little bride” by one of the other characters) returns to Kits Beach at dusk as “the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun’s setting—and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight.”

The clouds were scarcer, the light stronger on the January afternoon I prowled around Kits—but otherwise Munro has nailed the scene. I can perfectly imagine the struggling young writer stretched on her bed in the tiny dark bedroom, bolting down Colette and Henry Green, or bending over a notebook at the kitchen table, as the little bride in “Cortes Island” does, “filling page after page with failure.”

However, there was no sign of anguished artistes the day of my visit. Fit young women jog through the park. A spread of fruit and pastry awaits a hungry movie crew outside the trendy Watermark Restaurant (Vancouver has become a big moviemaking town in recent years). I stroll a few blocks up from the beach to Fourth Avenue—thirty years ago the main drag of Vancouver’s counterculture (the scoundrel hippie brother in Munro’s story “Forgiveness in Families” lived around here in a house full of smiling Hare Krishna–type priests), but now as bright and tony as New York’s Columbus Avenue or San Francisco’s Fillmore Street. The one holdover from Munro’s time is Duthie Books—a literary bookstore that once had branches all over the city but has recently retreated to this one last thoroughly gentrified location.

The Munros’ Kitsilano chapter was brief. By 1953 the couple had decamped to the North Shore suburbs just across the Lions Gate Bridge—first to a rather drab tract house in rainy North Vancouver, and then to a nicer place with a big front garden perched on a slope in the Dundarave section of West Vancouver. Two daughters arrived in quick succession (a third died the day she was born). The family lived in Dundarave for the next seven years, Jim commuting to his job downtown, Alice attempting to keep her art alive while managing the household.

The West Vancouver setting crops up again and again in Munro’s stories—but it’s always colored by the strain she was under in those years. “When I got home from school my mother would be sitting in that chair in the living room in the dark,” Munro’s daughter Sheila recalls. “She had great promise—she had published some stories—but she didn’t know if she would continue to do it. She just wanted to be left alone to write.”

The Dundarave house is still there, and so is the shopping block on Marine Drive where Munro used to walk (she never learned to drive) to do her marketing or to work in the office she rented for a while or to take Sheila to ballet class. Sheila remembers the block of shops as wonderfully ordinary—a hardware store, grocery store, cleaners, and a Chinese restaurant.

But some of Vancouver’s newfound cool has wafted across the water and today downtown Dundarave has a bit of the air of Sausalito—galleries and coffee places, chowder and sushi, a scattering of petals on the sidewalk outside the florist. In summer it would be the perfect place to grab a cappuccino, assemble a picnic, and then head for the beach, two blocks away at Dundarave Pier or a hop east at Ambleside.

“Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs,” opens “Jakarta,” one of Munro’s most memorable Vancouver stories from The Love of a Good Woman. It’s unmistakably Ambleside Beach—though faux Mediterranean palazzi have muscled out most of the cottages that line the shore in Munro’s story. From their outpost behind the logs, Kath and Sonje clutch their D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield and eye the gaggle of blowsy, noisy housewives they dub the Monicas:

These women aren’t so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they’ve reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate the bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus trees, the cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath feels their threat particularly, since she’s a mother now herself. When she nurses her baby she often reads a book, sometimes smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a sludge of animal functions.

This is pure Munro: the social anxiety, the fusing of insecurity and disdain, the heavy tug of ordinary life, the way dread can rise and spread until it erases everything lovely. “She’s always dead-on,” Sheila Munro says when I ask if the descriptions of places ring true to her childhood memories. And yet it strikes me when I walk out on Ambleside pier that Munro has neglected to mention this stupendous setting—the echoing curves of bridge and cove and mountain, the dull silver of the sea, the green-black hump of Stanley Park, all this grandeur of land and water so close it’s as if the great northern wilderness laps at the city’s feet.

But Munro was always oppressed, almost crushed by Vancouver’s fabled vistas. In the story “Memorial,” also set in West Vancouver, a character named Eileen challenges a wealthy foolish man who boasts about his water and mountain view:

“Well suppose you’re in a low mood…and you get up and here spread out before you is this magnificent view. All the time, you can’t get away from it. Don’t you ever feel not up to it?”

“Not up to it?”

“Guilty,” said Eileen, persistently though regretfully. “That you’re not in a better mood? That you’re not more—worthy, of this beautiful view?”

In 1963, the Munros left Dundarave and moved to Victoria to open a bookstore. The marriage broke up nine years later, and Alice returned to Ontario and eventually remarried, but the bookstore is still there—Munro’s Books, still run by Jim, still one of the finest in Canada.

Alice never again lived in Vancouver, though she does visit to collect prizes and still occasionally sets a story there.

“What Is Remembered,” from the 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, is one of her best and touches on all of her totemic Vancouver spots. Meriel, the young wife at the center of the story, is at a funeral in Dundarave when a man unknown to her, a doctor and bush pilot from the far north, offers to drive her on a visit to a distant suburb. All afternoon, sexual tension mounts until the pilot pulls over at the Prospect Point viewing area in Stanley Park, and the two strangers get out of the car and start wildly kissing.

Munro brings them to the glass-bricked entrance of a “small, decent building” in Kitsilano, but while they consummate their mad upsurge of passion in a borrowed flat, she cuts away to describe the setting Meriel would have preferred for adultery: “A narrow six- or seven-story hotel, once a fashionable place of residence, in the West End of Vancouver. Curtains of yellowed lace, high ceilings, perhaps an iron grill over part of the window, a fake balcony. Nothing actually dirty or disreputable, just an atmosphere of long accommodation of private woes and sins.”

It’s just the kind of place Munro herself prefers—places like the Buchan Hotel, tucked away on a leafy side street near Stanley Park, or the ivy-covered Sylvia Hotel overlooking English Bay. By a stroke of literary magic, Munro makes an afternoon of adultery in Kitsilano all the more electric by having it happen offstage and in the wrong place, the wrong part of town, the wrong kind of bedroom.

In a way, it’s a perfect metaphor for Munro’s own relationship to Vancouver. For her, this was always the wrong place—the views too grand, the weather too gray, the trees too tall. She never cared for the stodgy, repressed Vancouver of the 1950s, and by all accounts she hasn’t warmed much more to the sleek city of today. And yet, after you read her Vancouver stories, you sense her watchful, uprooted presence everywhere.

It’s a sign of Munro’s greatness as a writer that she so pervades a place that she never really surrendered herself to.

Originally published in June 2006.

Seattle-based writer David Laskin is the author of a number of nonfiction books, including The Children’s Blizzard and The Family.