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Lives of Girls and Women is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.
As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body's insistent desires, and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood.
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Munro follows the late childhood and adolescence of Del Jordan, an intelligent girl growing up in Jubilee, Ontario (one of the most palpable fictional towns in all of Canadian fiction) in the 1940s. Del is ordinary enough--she doesn't fit into her community, but this is the lot of any gifted child in a small, working-class town. Her father raises silver foxes for a living, her mother (a tentative feminist living in a decidedly traditionalist community) drives the back roads trying to sell encyclopedias to farmers. Del's passage through the usual travails of growing up (family deaths, lost friends, the awkward beginnings of sexuality) is rendered with extraordinary skill. It is easy to find compassionate writers, but the Munro of Lives of Girls and Women is a much more valuable find: a writer blessed with empathy, humour, and even cruelty. She can lovingly eviscerate her characters when it is necessary, yet never slips into the lazy shorthand of caricature. Some of her short story collections are better made (Open Secrets and Who Do You Think You Are?, for example), but the scope of Lives of Girls and Women makes it one of Munro's most memorable books. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Munro is a master of characterization and narrative structure. Del's description of her mother, for example, reveals: (1) Del's feeling of discomfort at her own place within Jubilee's hierarchy and environment; Del wants to fit in, and her mother embodies the eccentric within her own self. (2) Del's mother's strengths, pulling herself from abject poverty, putting herself through school, starting her own business in conservative postwar rural Canada - this woman evokes our admiration, despite the disgust of our narrator. It's these multidimensional portraits that makes Munro so great - yes, a character (Del's mother) can earn our admiration, disgust, and pity all at once...
Then in the building of conflict, Munro ALWAYS surprises us. Every scene is fresh, new, interesting, every culmination of conflict resolves in ways we would never expect. Take the time when Del was being molested by her mother's boarder's boyfriend. One day she goes off with him in his car out to the country, and we're expecting some "Bastard Out of Carolina" child-raping exploitation and subsequent weepy victim hood. But Munro makes a left at the light, has the man simply masturbate in front of the child, who for her part is excited, charmed, and repelled by the sight and is grateful to be introduced to the mystery of the penis.
And lastly, Munro refuses to depict her women in the same, old tired way. Her women are not dragged around by the hand by handsome strangers, as they so often are in movies. Her women are not victims of rape, incest, or peer pressure, as in way too many contemporary novels. No, Munro's women are real. They have drive, ambition, and a deep desire to be seen as people.
Definitely one of my favorite books, ever.
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