Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The Title Story

Johanna Parry is a housekeeper in her fifties, plain, efficient, invisible to the family she works for. Two teenage girls, bored and mean-spirited, begin writing letters in the name of their absent father—a charming, dissolute man named Ken Boudreau—to Johanna, pretending that Ken is in love with her. The letters are a prank. Johanna believes them.

What Johanna does with the letters is the beginning of Munro’s story and its moral center. She packs up. She sells her furniture. She takes a train across the country to the western city where Ken lives and she sets about making herself useful to him. Ken is bewildered, then irritated, then—in ways the story renders with great delicacy—genuinely grateful. Something that the prank letters invented, Johanna makes real.

The story was adapted into a film (Hateship Loveship, 2013) and the adaptation, while competent, demonstrates what is irreducible in Munro: the way time works in her prose, the way the story moves through years in a paragraph and then renders a single scene with forensic precision, the way Johanna’s inner life is both entirely legible and entirely mysterious. What the story knows that the film cannot quite convey is that Johanna is not deluded. She understands the letters are probably fabricated. She goes anyway, because she has identified what she wants and has decided to take it.

Love’s Forms

The eight stories that surround the title piece form one of Munro’s most thematically coherent collections. The title’s five-word inventory—hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage—names the permutations the collection explores. There is parental love: “Floating Bridge,” about a woman with cancer whose husband, convinced she is dying, has begun building a new life, and who is not dying after all. There is the love between women: “Queenie,” about a half-sister and the strange bond that survives abandonment and distance. There is the love that arrives too late, the love that is refused, the love that survives the death of the beloved by decades.

What unifies Munro’s treatment is the refusal to rank these forms of love or to identify any of them as more real or more worthy than the others. The erotic love in “Nettles”—a brief, failed reunion between two people who loved each other decades earlier—is treated with the same weight as the long marriage in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” in which a husband must decide how to respond when his wife with Alzheimer’s disease falls in love with another resident at her care facility. Both stories end without resolution; both leave the reader with the sense of having understood something that cannot be stated.

Middle Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage was published in 2001, between the earlier collections that established Munro’s reputation—The Beggar Maid, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth—and the late masterpieces Runaway (2004) and Dear Life (2013). It sits at the center of her career, demonstrating all the formal techniques of her mature style while maintaining a thematic accessibility that the later, more formally daring collections sometimes sacrifice.

The collection is an excellent entry point for readers new to Munro. The title story is perhaps the most immediately engaging thing she ever wrote, a story that announces its moral in action rather than argument. The range of the remaining eight stories demonstrates the full scope of what she considers love’s territory. And the restraint of the collection—its unwillingness to be lyrical for its own sake, to sentimentalize, to explain—models the kind of reading Munro requires and rewards.

The Architecture of Time

The technical marvel of these stories is what Munro does with time. A single story may open in the present, leap back forty years, circle through a marriage and its disappointments, and arrive at an old age the reader did not see coming—all without the seams showing. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is the supreme example: it moves between Grant and Fiona’s courtship, their long imperfect marriage, and the present of her decline into Alzheimer’s, so that by the end the reader has lived an entire shared life and understands exactly why Grant makes the strange, generous choice he does. Munro called her stories things you go into “as you go into a house,” moving from room to room, and the metaphor explains why she resisted the novel form: she could hold a whole life inside thirty pages by collapsing chronology rather than narrating it sequentially. No writer of her generation compressed more human experience into less space, and this collection shows the technique at full maturity.

Munro and the Nobel Prize

Alice Munro, who lived and set most of her fiction in small-town Ontario, spent her entire career devoted almost exclusively to the short story, an unusual choice that once seemed to limit her standing and ultimately redefined what the form could do. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed by the Swedish Academy as a “master of the contemporary short story”—a recognition that confirmed what her readers had long argued, that the story need cede nothing to the novel in depth or ambition. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is among the books most often recommended to readers approaching her for the first time, precisely because the title story is so immediately gripping and the collection’s theme so clearly drawn. From here, the natural next steps are Runaway and the final, partly autobiographical Dear Life, which together complete the portrait of one of the great bodies of work in modern fiction.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — One of Munro’s most approachable and thematically unified collections. The title story is an ideal introduction to what makes her the greatest living master of the short story form.