in chains

At Emerson I had a thesis advisor who didn’t give two craps about me, and every time we met I would remind him about my project and he would ask me if I had ever read anything by Alice Munro.

“No,” I’d say.  “Not since last week.”

“Oh,” he’d say, as if perhaps this was the first time he and I were having this conversation. “Well, I like Alice Munro very much.”

It was too bad for this professor that Alice Munro was not his thesis advisee, and once I lost my temper and told him so, but in the end he circled every single and in the first twenty pages of my novel which was frankly one of the more helpful things anyone ever did for me in college.

This weekend I finally did read some Alice Munro, slouched in a seat on the Lake Shore Limited and crunching away on a bag of pretzel nuggets, and I am sorry but unsurprised to report that I found her smug and unbearably priggish. I imagine her face all pinched and lemony in that way that British people and thesis advisors sometimes look, like maybe you’re going to spill your cocktail on their Review of Books or leave a trail of unnecessary conjunctions on their rugs, like probably in five minutes this story is going to be made into a soporific art house feature for which Dame Judi Dench will be nominated as Best Supporting Actress.

This is, you understand, only one of the many reasons why I am never going to be published in the New Yorker.

It’s not like this is some shocking revelation: as a reader and a writer, I have always been more Hoffman than Munro, and if I’m not mistaken it was a particularly notable Brit who advised to thine own self be true. I think I knew it in the back of my mind even then as I slogged through my thesis, sitting there across from this supposedly brilliant academic letdown with my 200 pages of  YA romance and thinking: you and me and Alice, buddy. We are certainly not writing for each other.