Too Much Happiness

Lives in Full

The nine stories that precede the title piece in Too Much Happiness demonstrate Munro at the height of her powers as a writer of what might be called the expanded short story—narratives that cover decades in a few dozen pages, that move with startling confidence through time, that refuse to settle on a climax or a moment of resolution.

Several of the collection’s stories deal directly with violence against women. “Dimensions” opens with a woman visiting her husband in a psychiatric institution after he has killed their children. “Wenlock Edge” involves a young woman placed in a position of sexual danger by a man who might be testing her or might simply be exposing her. “Face” is narrated by a man with a large birthmark—an outsider’s perspective on the cruelty of the social world—but the cruelties it examines are gendered. What is characteristic of all these treatments is Munro’s refusal to make the violence exceptional or the women passive: they continue to live, to make choices, to be complicated people whose relationship to what happened to them cannot be reduced to victimhood.

The formal signature of this collection—as of all late Munro—is the temporal leap. Stories will move twenty or thirty years in a paragraph, then slow down to render a single afternoon in minute detail. The reader must pay close attention to where in time the narrative has arrived.

The Title Story

“Too Much Happiness” is the longest story in the collection and the reason the book endures. It follows Sophia Kovalevsky—the Russian mathematician who in 1888 became the first woman to hold a full university mathematics professorship in Europe—across the last years of her life: her relationships, her travels between Stockholm and Paris, her friendships and love affairs, her death at forty-one on a train.

What Munro achieves in this story is extraordinary: she makes the mathematics legible without simplifying it, makes St. Petersburg and Stockholm and Paris in the 1880s as immediate as the Ontario towns she usually inhabits, and renders Kovalevsky as fully realized a character as anyone in her fiction. The title—Kovalevsky’s own phrase, her conviction that she was experiencing too much happiness just before her death—carries the story’s central insight: that a life of unusual achievement and unusual freedom, a life of genuine happiness, can also be a life of constant negotiation with a world that did not wish such a life to be available to a woman.

The story could stand alone as a novella. In the context of the collection, it reads as Munro’s most explicit statement about female genius and the world’s resistance to it.

Munro’s Late Style

Too Much Happiness was published in 2009, five years after Runaway (2004), which many critics consider her masterpiece, and four years before Dear Life (2013), her final collection and the one that contains her most explicitly autobiographical work. It sits in the most productive decade of her late career, the period in which she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

What distinguishes Munro’s late style from her earlier work is the willingness to range more widely in time and space. Her stories had always been rooted in Huron County, Ontario; in the late collections they increasingly venture into other periods and places—19th-century Russia, 1940s Europe, the deeper past of Canadian settlement. The formal architecture becomes more complex, the temporal ellipses more daring.

Too Much Happiness is not quite the canonical Munro collection—Runaway and Lives of Girls and Women are more frequently cited—but the title story alone makes it essential.

The Master of the Short Story

Alice Munro is one of the very few writers to build a towering reputation almost entirely on short fiction, and Too Much Happiness is a fine demonstration of why she is so often called the form’s greatest modern practitioner. When she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 — the first Canadian and the first writer primarily of short stories to win it — the award confirmed what critics had long argued: that Munro routinely compresses the scope, depth, and time-span of a novel into thirty pages, with no sense of compression at all. Her admirers, including the writer Cynthia Ozick who called her “our Chekhov,” prize exactly this — the way a Munro story can leap across decades in a sentence, reverse a reader’s understanding with a single late revelation, and render the moral texture of an entire life in a handful of scenes.

What to Expect From the Collection

The stories in Too Much Happiness are darker and more violent than is sometimes expected of Munro — they include murder, betrayal, illness, and sudden cruelty — and they range more widely in time and place than her early Ontario-rooted work, reaching back into nineteenth-century Europe for the title story. This is characteristic of her late style, which grew more formally daring and more willing to venture beyond Huron County even as it retained her hallmark attention to the inner lives of women and the quiet catastrophes of ordinary existence. While devoted readers often point first to Runaway or Dear Life as the essential Munro collections, Too Much Happiness is a rewarding entry point and an indispensable one for the title novella alone — a portrait of the mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky that stands among the finest things Munro ever wrote. For anyone curious about why the short story, in the right hands, can do everything a novel does, this collection is a persuasive place to begin.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — The title story is a late-career masterpiece. The rest of the collection demonstrates why Munro deserved the Nobel Prize: no living writer does more with the short story form.