Marianne Kimura

`People Who Win`: Alice Munro`s Competitive Suburbanites

“You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.” ---Anton Chekhov, in a letter to a friend

Introduction

Canadian writer Alice Munro (b. 1931) wrote her first collection of short

stories, Dance of the Happy Shades over a fifteen year time period, starting about 1954,

with publication in 1968. She wrote these stories while she was also busy being a

suburban housewife and mother in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Her background was decidedly not suburban: she grew up on a fox-pelt farm in

Ontario; after high school she received a scholarship to study for two years at the

University of Western Ontario. After the scholarship money ran out in 1951, she

married James Munro, a fellow student, and they moved to the suburbs of Vancouver.

They raised three children and ran a bookstore together there while she was also writing

fiction in her spare time. In 1972 their marriage failed and she returned to Ontario

where she still lives and works as a writer. Her short stories have won numerous awards

including the Canadian Governor General`s Award for fiction and the Canada-Australia

Literary Prize.

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Alice Munro told critic John Metcalf in 1972 that “The Shining Houses” (the

second story in Dance of the Happy Shades) was `One of the few that I`ve written that had

a B.C. setting and that drew on my life as an adult. I don`t think it was a very successful

story`”.1 Critic W.R. Martin agrees with Munro`s negative evaluation, “the suburbanites are

set up like clay pigeons and the formula or schema is too simple and obtrusive”.2 Yet I`ll

argue that this very simplicity makes for a natural lens through which it`s possible to see

Munro`s thematic concerns in an embryonic or incipient form, concerns having to do with

the tensions between rural farm life in the past and modern life of the suburb and city,

concerns she would return to again and again throughout her long career. “The Shining

Houses” simply, elegantly and correctly states the nature of the problems people face

when confronting modern patterns of living, such as suburbs and big cities. Many of her

later stories would elaborate on this theme, playing out the psychological ramifications

and examining in greater detail what this early story outlines more basically.

A Summary of the Story

Alice Munro`s short story “The Shining Houses” (1968) chronicles a couple of

hours in the life of a housewife named Mary. In the first half of the story, Mary visits　

Mrs. Fullerton, a neighbor who lives on an old little ramshackle farm next to the new　

suburban development named Garden Place, where Mary lives. In a very ordinary

conversation, Mrs. Fullerton talks about her past, her family, her farm. In the second half of

the story, Mary and her young son Danny walk through Garden Place and go to a birthday

party for a neighbor’s child. The birthday party guests are a mix of adults and children, and

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the adults there (all residents of the new Garden Place subdivision) discuss how they can

make Mrs. Fullerton shut her farm down and move away. Their complaints about Mrs.

Fullerton`s farm center on its appearance and its smells and they are convinced Mrs.

Fullerton`s farm is bringing down the values of their suburban houses.. The little farm, with

its “rough sheds and stacked wood and compost heaps”3 is a contrast to the new “shining

houses”4 with “stucco and siding”5 which make up the title of the story and where the

suburban residents live. The suburbanites do not work as farmers and Munro makes sure to

explain that the husbands “are not men who made their livings by physical work”. 6

Finally one of the fathers at the birthday party, a “real estate salesman, stocky,

earnest, successful”7 named Carl explains that he has been to the Municipal Office to check

on legal ways to force Mrs. Fullerton to leave. He goes on to say that he has found one way:

the residents of Garden Place must sign a petition asking the town to build a lane that

passes through the property of Mrs. Fullerton. Mrs. Fullerton`s land includes a “lane

allowance” which means that a road can be put through it by the city and Mrs. Fullerton

would have to leave. The birthday party guests all sign the petition but Mary refuses to do

so, saying “we haven`t the right”8 even though her friends all her to sign it, with one saying,

“You live here too”.9 The neighbors drown out Mary's attempt to argue against them:

"(Mary) could try all night and never find any words to stand up to their words, which came

at her now invincibly from all sides: shack, eyesore, filthy, property, value".10 Finally, Mary

refuses to feel animosity towards the suburbanites: “it occurred to her that they (the

suburban neighbors) were right, for themselves, for whatever it was they had to be”. 11

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Suburbia and the Car Brought Changes to the Landscape

For sixty to seventy years, the dominant residential pattern in North America

(Canada and the United States) has been the suburb. A suburb has two basic characteristics:

it is comprised of single family detached houses with a yard, usually a lawn; and the car

usually must be used for traveling to shops, schools, work places and so forth since suburbs

are set away from areas of commerce and are generally inaccessible to anyone without a

car. Prior to the widespread use of the automobile, living arrangements in North America

generally were small compact towns surrounded by farms and areas of commerce were

accessible by walking, trolley car, bicycle or by horse.This meant that living

arrangements---the built environment of dwellings, shops, roads and workplaces--- looked

very different than the infrastructure we see today, by and large generated by the needs of

mass automobile use.

Over time the built environment changes to reflect new ways of life. As the

transition from old to modern occurs, conflicts over development arise when some people

want to retain parts of the past (a farm, a pasture, an old estate or old harbor, etc.) while

others want to use the same space to build something more profitable (a suburban

subdivision, a highway, a fast-food restaurant, a shopping mall, a parking lot, etc.).

Munro`s story details one small example, one woman`s encounter with such a conflict. This

story provides guidance and necessary information to people who are living with the

physical changes in the landscape wrought by the modern era.

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Munro`s Story Foreshadows Later Findings

How exactly does “The Shining Houses” provide this guidance and

information? “The Shining Houses” tells a brief episode in the larger story of the

economic process: one small farm meets its doom at the hands of its new suburban

neighbors who deplore its appearance and fear that its presence will lower their

property values . Munro is not an economist by training and she majored in English

Literature in college, so perhaps it was her farming background, with its careful

calculations of inputs and outputs bearing the slimmest of profits by which her family

could live, that helped her to intuitively understand the far-reaching roots of the human

economic process.12 The conclusions she reaches in “The Shining Houses” about human

economic life actually seem to foreshadow the results of research on energy and culture

that would come decades after this story. This ingenious fictional story outlines in a

precise and detailed microcosm the contours of our species` own encounter with a new

and powerful energy resource---oil from the organic matter accumulated from the solar

rays of the sun over eons--- and an aware reader can grasp the penetrating and systemic

treatment she gives to our situation as a species competing for survival while also

following the universal rules which govern matter and energy.

Turning to the specific nature of how “The Shining Houses” fulfills its goals, I

will start with a book published in 1988 called The Collapse of Complex Societies by

Joseph Tainter, Head of the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State

University. Tainter wanted to understand the principles underlying the changes we see

in history as countries, governments, civilizations, groups of people, change, appear,

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disappear or move over time: “The image of lost civilizations is compelling: cities

buried by drifting sands or tangled jungle, ruin and desolation where once there were

people and abundance”. 13 Tainter conducted case studies of lost civilizations (Roman

Empire, Maya, Chacoan others) and concluded that problems occur as successful

civilizations expand over time, use more and more energy as they compete and prevail

over competitors (becoming more complex in the process of becoming more successful)

but then reach a limit and fail when they are unable to sustain access –or increase

access--to the energy needed to continue to maintain the complex structure of the

society. For Tainter, the primary limiting resource whose shortfall spells doom for a

civilization is energy: “Not only is energy flow required to maintain a sociopolitical

system but the amount of energy must be sufficient for the complexity of that system”.

14 It can be said that energy is obviously a “master resource” which can generate access

to other resources such as water, minerals, foods, weapons, medicines, and so forth.

Munro`s “The

Shining Houses” also shows an intense awareness of the successive nature of settlement

patterns with one way of life giving way to the next for economic reasons, and it is not

just manifest in the situation where the suburbanites will seize Mrs. Fullerton`s land and

turn it into a road. Here is her description of the land area which underlies the suburban

development of Garden Place:

“And under the structure of this new subdivision, there was still something else

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to be seen; that was the old city, the old wilderness city that had lain on the side of the mountain. It had to be called a city because there were tramlines running into the woods, the houses had numbers and there were all the public buildings of a city, down by the water. But houses like Mrs. Fullerton`s had been separated from each other by uncut forest and a jungle of wild blackberry and salmonberry bushes; these surviving houses, with thick smoke coming out of their chimneys, walls unpainted and patched and showing different degrees of age and darkening, rough sheds and stacked wood and compost heaps and gray board fences around them----these appeared every so often among the large new houses of Mimosa and Marigold and Heather Drive---dark, enclosed, expressing something like savagery in their disorder and the steep, unmatched angles of roofs and lean-tos; not possible on these streets, but there.” 15

The “old wilderness city” with its defunct tramlines represents the built environment

that preceeded suburbia. Although most of the city is now gone (except the public

buildings that remain down by the water, with waterways, like tram lines, being

common transportation routes before the oil era) small farms that used to surround this

largely vanished tiny city still, like Mrs. Fullerton`s, “appeared every so often”. The

new way of life, unlike the old farms, includes a car and a suburban house and the

office jobs that go along with this sort of economy.

Ways of life do come and then pass by, for economic reasons. But it is surely

not possible to say that the old wilderness city on the side of the mountain “collapsed”

in that the costs of maintaining this structure were too high. Rather, the new suburban

development is part of a new and bigger sociopolitical organization, constructed on a

much vaster scale than the old wilderness city. We know that the suburban families

have great energy resources at their disposal: they have cars which use gasoline

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processed from oil and oil collected from the deposits in the ground has one of the

highest EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) ratings of all energy forms

available.16 Tainter makes it clear that higher rates of energy flow available to a society

increase the level of sociopolitical organization of that society: “Energy flow and

sociopolitical organization are opposite sides of an equation”.17 The old wilderness city

has been absorbed by the new suburban development and this absorption apparently

continues apace; the suburbanites want to remove all traces of the small farms that once

formed the edge –and the food (energy) supply--of this old city. The Municipal Office,

also part of the newer larger sociopolitical organization, will be part of this effort as it

stands ready to enforce the lane allowance. The suburbanites are, of course, far

from collapsing at the time of this story. Rather their way of life is in a strong growth

mode, with more homes being built and a “new shopping centre”18 coming soon . So

where does Munro forecast the passing of the suburban way of life? She manages this

creatively by using a sort of optical illusion, a device available to her as an artist, and

one who works effectively in images. Mary and Danny are walking home after the

party: “Outside it was quite dark, the white houses were growing dim, the clouds

breaking and smoke blowing from Mrs. Fullerton`s chimney. The pattern of Garden

Place, so assertive in the daytime, seemed to shrink at night into the raw black

mountainside.” 19 Munro uses the interesting word “pattern” here as if to dismiss all

suburban development “patterns”. Garden Place (visually at least) disappears into the

night, and Munro makes sure to highlight the ultimate power of nature: “the raw black

mountainside”.

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Tainter explains that “complex societies are recent in human history. Collapse

then is not a fall to some primordial level of chaos, but a return to the normal human

condition of lower complexity.” 20 Munro`s vision of “the smoke blowing from Mrs

Fullerton`s chimney” seems also to strikingly give Mrs. Fullerton`s simpler way of life,

along with nature, the last word. The suburbs collapse virtually and visually: Munro is

obliquely predicting that they won`t last. The collapse of the expensive and complex

way of life that is suburbia (and Tainter makes it clear that “collapse is an economizing

process”21), if and when it happens, will be possibly tied to natural forces (“the raw

black mountainside”), such as, perhaps the depletion of natural energy resources.

Munro also explicitly uses the word “energy” in conjunction with the

suburbanites in an earlier passage: “Today, since it was Saturday, all the men were out

working around their houses. They were digging drainage ditches and making rockeries

and clearing off and burning torn branches and brush. They worked with competitive

violence and energy.”22 For now, as of 1968, the energy is all on the suburbanites` side,

while Mrs. Fullerton is old and powerless. Munro is referring to human physical energy

but her words, perhaps, allude to fossil fuel energy.

Competition and Complexity

The new suburban way of life, reliant on fossil fuels and office workers,　

overlays and displaces the old economic ways of life, which subsisted through small

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farms and a compact village in the center. Small farms rely on energy from the sun to

keep them going. Mrs. Fullerton`s “house and its surroundings were so self-sufficient,

with their complicated and seemingly unalterable layout of vegetables and flower beds,

apple and cherry trees, wired chicken run, berry patch and wooden walks, woodpile, a

great many roughly built dark little sheds, for hens or rabbits or a goat.”23 In this type of

small farm, purchased inputs of food would be almost unnecessary. The chickens would

eat insects and produce eggs and fertilizer, the goat would eat grass and produce milk

and fertilizer, the rabbits would eat grass and could be eaten. The fruit trees and

vegetable fields would also provide food for free.

Why then is the old way of life (with its low `food mileage`, to use a term now

in vogue) such an unattractive option to all the young suburbanites who are anxious to

live only in suburbia, a place where consumption ---not production--- is the manifest

rule of the day? What is so important about living in suburbia that they won`t even

tolerate a non-suburban living next to them? Munro`s use of the word “savagery”24 in a

description of the old farms (“dark, enclosed, expressing something like savagery in

their disorder and the steep, unmatched angles of roofs and lean-tos; not possible on

these streets, but there”25) hints at the problem the suburbanites have with Mrs.

Fullerton`s way of life. First of all, the increasing levels of complexity being generated

by the rising energy availability make the simpler past seem “savage”---backward,

primitive, outdated. Tainter stresses that complexity in a society is generated by

problem-solving as people seek to change what they want to improve on or take an

opportunity for an advantage.26 It seems that Mrs. Fullerton is not engaged in the

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problem-solving popular among the suburbanites. After all, she is focused on small

farming, or food production at the small scale. She is a marginal figure and the

suburbanites want her only to go away.

The problem is that Garden Place is not the only suburb in its local area:

“Garden Place was already put down, in the minds of people who understood addresses,

as less luxurious than Pine Hills but more desirable than Wellington Park.”27 The

residents and owners of Garden Place are then in economic competition with the

residents and owners of surrounding new suburban developments. Who can be more

successful? Whose property values can rise more quickly? As one Garden Place

resident says. “…just standing there (Mrs Fullerton`s) house is bringing down the resale

value of every house on the street.” 28 The Garden Place residents therefore feel that in

order to compete they must force Mrs Fullerton to move. Her farm carries the taint of a

simpler, less materialistically successful era--the hierarchical structure of the

sociopolitical organization means that there are levels of status and maintaining this

status , partly through accumulation of wealth, is vitally important. “(Garden Place`s

houses) were for people like Mary and her husband and their child, with not much

money but expectations of more.” 29Mrs. Fullerton, complaining about the price of eggs

dropping due to competition from the supermarket, certainly doesn`t have expectations

of more money, but less. To be living near her is to suffer `guilt by association`.

Tainter

specifically comments on the relationship between competition and complexity. He is

referring to city-states but we can also apply his statement to the group of suburbanites

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in Garden Place..

“In competitive, or potentially competitive, peer polity situations the option to collapse to a lower level of complexity is an invitation to be dominated by some other member of the cluster. To the extent that such domination is to be avoided, investment in organizational complexity must be maintained at a level comparable to one`s competitors, even if marginal returns become unfavorable.” 30

The suburbanites are not facing collapse any time soon, of course, but they

must maintain their status among their peers---the other suburbanites---because the

other suburbanites are also competing. Who won`t compete will lose. Munro`s

anticipation of Tainter`s later detailed anthropological research is imaginative and also

tantalizingly accurate and perceptive, sketching out Tainter`s main ideas in an artful

microcosm.

Entropy, Energy and Into the Cool

The economic aspects of the problem with Mrs. Fullerton`s farm go beyond the

downscale image of a “barnyard”.31Here is an exchange between Mary and Mrs.

Fullerton:

“I thought I might offer my black cherries for sale next summer,“ Mrs. Fullerton said. “Come and pick your own and they`re fifty cents a box. I can`t risk my old bones up a ladder no more.”“That`s too much,” Mary said, smiling. “They`re cheaper than that at the supermarket.” Mrs. Fullerton already hated the supermarket for lowering the price of eggs. 32

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Later on, at the birthday party, a Garden Place resident named Janie Inger, angry

about the “smell” of Mrs Fullerton`s farm says, “I`m going to stop buying (Mrs Fullerton`s

eggs). The supermarket`s cheaper and who cares that much about fresh?”33 Why are eggs

and cherries (and likely everything else) cheaper at the supermarket than at Mrs Fullerton`s

farm? The answer is probably well-known to anyone with even a fleeting familiarity with

economics: “economies of scale” makes producing on a large scale cheaper per unit of

output than producing at a small scale. Mrs. Fullerton can`t compete on costs against large

producers because synthetic fertilizers and machines were changing agriculture radically

throughout the second half of the 20th century. People had figured out how to tap the

intense, powerful energy source of oil and natural gas, used to power the machines and used

to synthesize the fertilizer.

This story, which confronts in microcosm the changes in agriculture, the

building of roads and other massive infrastructure including the rise of suburbia, is

really the story of the human encounter with an energetically dense and abundant

planetary energy source: oil. Astonishingly, in “The Shining Houses” Munro, I

believe, frames the relationship between life and energy more deeply and more subtly

than even Tainter does. In order to explain what I mean, I`ll turn to a much more

recent scholarly work, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (2005).

Building on and synthesizing work by biologists, physicists, chemists and other

scientists, such as Alfred Lotka who studied population dynamics and econometrics,

authors Eric Schneider (an ecologist who worked for the National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Association) and Dorian Sagan explain:

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The universe is a complex place, and its most common and its most interesting systems, including those of life, are open systems. Seal them up, imprison them, and they collapse. We (humans) are a particular material pattern of energy flow with a long history and a natural function. Our essential nature has more to do with the cosmos and its laws than with Rome (or any other human society) and its rules.34

Sagan and Schneider investigate the similarity between living and non-living NET

(Nonequilibrium Thermodynamic) systems in their responses to energy; a

“Nonequilibrium Thermodynamic” system is, as the passage above suggests, open, non-

static, changing, in flux---a living person is one example. To this end, they explore

underlying similarities in patterns where chemicals or cells or organisms or other systems

(including human economies) come into being (evolving) as they dissipate energy.

Dissipating energy is one of the ways the Second Law of Thermodynamics35 (also called

“the Entropy Law”) manifests itself.

Why is energy so important to living organisms (like humans, animals, plants, etc) and

also to non-living systems (like hurricanes and solar systems) ? Because energy is defined

in physics as “the capacity to do work” and work is a “means of transferring energy into

coherent action”, whether it`s on an atomic level, a cellular level, in a car`s engine, a

grasshopper jumping or a human moving his legs while walking. Schneider`s and Sagan`s

research is exhaustive and focused on the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

Like other NET systems, life`s complexity is a natural outgrowth of the thermodynamic gradient reduction implicit is the second law: where and when possible, organizations come cycling into being to dissipate entropy as heat. Gradients, such as that between the sun and space, may be huge, and draining them may take literally eons. Nonetheless, the complex systems that come swirling into being near gradients are natural. Although they may sometimes seem to be organized by an outside force, no “agent deliberating” as Aristotle put it over 20 centuries ago, is needed. 36

14

Elsewhere Schneider and Sagan write that “Nonequilibrium thermodynamics makes it clear

that living is a chemical and physical process of an energetic universe.”37 They also spell out

that fossil fuels are a gradient developed by sun`s light striking the photosynthesizing cells of

plants (the plants being another energy dissipative NET system) and that:

Flowing through complex systems, energy forms the basis for trapping and cycling of materials in economies, which reduce both natural gradients, such as the redox gradient between fossil fuels and oxygen, and “synthetic” gradients such as price differentials. 38

Munro anticipates the exciting findings of the authors who conclude that “the

purposefulness of life has a thermodynamic origin” 39and life`s purpose “reflects the

advantages that accrue to living systems that ensure access to energy gradients.” 40There are

at least two instances in “The Shining Houses” where the basic ideas expressed in Into the

Cool find resonance. The last two paragraphs of the story, arguably the ones with the most

impact, come nearest:

The voices in the living room have blown away, Mary thought. If they would blow away and their plans be forgotten, if one thing could be left alone. But these are people who win, and they are good people; they want homes for their children, they help each other when there is trouble, they plan a community—saying that word as if they found a modern and well-proportioned magic in it, and no possibility anywhere of a mistake.

There is nothing you can do at present but put your hands in your pockets and keep a disaffected heart.41

Munro appears to recognize, in the words of Into the Cool, that “since

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organisms

and cells are nonequilibrium open systems, their behaviors, insofar as they

organize to make larger, more efficient gradient-reducing systems, will be

selected-for`. Or, as the authors of Into the Cool explain;

“organisms struggle not only for food and habitat, but for the energy that drives their material organization—their metabolism, reproduction, and expansion. Populations grow to take advantage of energy sources, enlarging flow regimes.”42

Garden Place is part of an “enlarged flow regime” while Mrs. Fullerton`s farm is clearly not,

and this is the core of the suburbanites` problem with her presence: her farm is a barrier to

the expansion of the energy flow regime which their way of life prescribes . The

suburbanites may not be aware of the thermodynamic realities playing out under the surface

of their lives, however. “Like many organisms, humans are sensing, moving, but not

necessarily rational agents”.43 Therefore there is nothing that Mary can do except put her

hands in her pockets and keep a disaffected heart; the suburbanites have “organized

themselves into a larger more efficient gradient-reducing system”. They are “good

people”----here Munro means they are `normal`, not evil or psychologically warped---with a

purpose like successful life-forms everywhere: to “ensure access to energy gradients”, and

“enlarge the energy flow regimes” which bring success for them . In the suburbs, material

success relies on one thing as a base: constant access to the oil reserves ---used in

transportation, construction, fertilizers, manufacturing (electricity generated from coal or

oil) that were so abundant back in 1969. Basically, the higher energy flows enable cycling of

more material and at higher rates. The suburbanites are people “who win”. Munro here

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seems to strike a evolutionary tone. “Life is complex thermodynamic system, not a paragon

of virtue” 44 assert Schneider and Sagan. Could there be a better or more succinct statement

of the suburbanites` moral position? Sounding herself like an ecologist or

a biologist dispassionately discussing a lion catching and mercilessly devouring an antelope

(another process set into motion by thermodynamics), Munro also writes about the

suburbanites: “…they were right, for themselves, for whatever it was they had to be.”

45The suburbanites are fully engaged in reducing “the redox gradient between fossil fuels

and oxygen”. The Second Law ensures that somebody has to dissipate this enormous

quantity of energy (as work and heat) and thus increase net entropy in the universe.

These suburbanites, with their cars and consumer lifestyles, are ideally suited for this

task: “right, for themselves, for whatever it was they had to be”.

“The End of the Automobile Age”

If, as the late economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen said “(that) the basic

nature of the economic process is entropic and that the Entropy Law rules supreme over

its process and over its evolution”46then why is Mary so opposed to the suburbanites?

The suburbanites, by using oil, are going to convert far more energy into waste heat and

work than Mrs. Fullerton, who uses only solar energy captured in her crops, ever can.

Why won`t she sign the petition even though she lives among them and presumably

stands to gain as much as they do from rising property values? The answer is that

Munro herself has a few reasons for disagreeing with the suburbanites, imagines that

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she is not alone, and wants to create a character which such a reader could sympathize

with and join forces with, emotionally and symbolically if not in person.

The biggest reason that Munro, like Mary, thinks that the suburbanites might

be making a “mistake” 47is vaguely hinted at when Mary notes, “there is nothing you

can do at present but put your hands in your pockets and keep a disaffected heart”. The

temporal dimension “at present” implies the time frame is short. Mary ---or rather,

Munro--- perhaps suspects that this energy bonanza (US oil production in the lower 48

states peaked in 1970, two years after the publication of this story) is finite.48 If so, then

the development of suburbia, so expensive and car-dependent, may be proven to have

been, in the words of a famous critic of suburbia, James Howard Kunstler: a “colossal

misinvestment ……….a prodigious, unparalleled misallocation of resources.”49

One of the best-

known scholarly works on suburbanization Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of

the United States (1985) by Kenneth T. Jackson (who was a professor of history at

Columbia University when he wrote the book) sees no long-term future for suburban

patterns of living:

"the United States is not only the world's first suburban nation, but it will also be its last. By 2025 the energy-inefficient and automobile-dependent suburban system of the American republic must give way to patterns of human activity and living structures that are energy efficient." 50

(His study focuses on American suburban development, which were not that different from

Canadian patterns where the latter occurred.) He cites the "rising real cost of energy and

the reduced availability of fluid fuels" 51 as the primary factor limiting further suburban

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growth. With him, Kunstler agrees that suburbia is a transitory phenomenon. He writes that

"The Auto Age, as we have known it, will shortly come to an end."52 He too sees the

decline in available petroleum energy as the main cause.53

“Where Your Roots Are”

But there are emotional reasons to disagree with suburban development, too,

which Munro herself alludes to when she writes

"I guess that maybe as a writer I'm a kind of anachronism....because I write about places where your roots are and most people don`t live that kind of life any more at all. Most writers, probably the writers who are most in tune with our time, write about places that have no texture because this is where most of us live.”54

Munro's own roots on a farm in rural Southern Ontario gave her access to the small

towns and rural landscapes that predated suburbia. Rural pre-1950 small-towns in Canada

and America meant places which relied on small-scale local farm economies.

What, exactly, does she mean by the phrase ''texture'' here? Decidedly, she means

to contrast the landscapes of her past with the modern places ("places that have no texture")

available to today's denizens of North America, where one suburb or big city looks like

another. Mrs. Fullerton's farm is described in the following passage:

"the house and its surroundings were so self-sufficient, with their complicated and seemingly unalterable layout of vegetables and flower beds, apple and cherry trees, wired chicken run, berry patch and wooden walks, woodpile, a great many roughly built dark little sheds, for hens, or rabbits or a goat. Here was no straightforward plan, no order that an outsider could understand; yet what was haphazard time had made final. The place had become fixed, impregnable, all its accumulations necessary, until it seemed that even the washtubs, mops, couch springs and stacks of police magazines on the back porch were there to stay." 55

Mrs. Fullerton`s farm is pure `texture` and she is the only character who has an interesting

"story" to tell. She tells Mary this story (about how her husband walked out on her) in her own words,

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using a kind of non-standard English dialect particular for her place. Her story has a mystery at its

center (why exactly did Mr. Fullerton leave her suddenly one summer day?), and her narrative

receives nearly two pages out of this 11-page story. Mrs. Fullerton's physical appearance is also

described fully :

"her eyes showed (her age), black as plums, with a soft inanimate sheen; things sank into them and they never changed. The life in her face was all in the nose and mouth, which were always twitching, fluttering, drawing tight grimace lines down her cheeks. When she came around every Friday on her egg deliveries her hair was curled, her blouse held together by a bunch of cotton flowers, her mouth painted, a spidery and ferocious line of red." 56

In contrast, the Garden Place suburbanites don't seem to be unique characters, nor

are any except for Carl, roughly sketched as "stocky, earnest, successful", described at all.

The Garden Place residents seem to all resemble each other when they talk (no one has a

dialect, or a long story with a mystery at its heart to tell, they all complain about Mrs.

Fullerton) . Also, they are depicted as doing the same things: "A dozen neighborhood

women sat around the living room, absently holding the balloons they had been given by

their children."57

Narrative expands and grows strong, poetic, detailed, memorable, and flavorful in

the presence of the local, quirky, individual character of Mrs. Fullerton. But once possessed

by the Garden Place residents, narrative and narrative power seems to fade, pale, shrink,

become unsubstantial, undifferentiated and general. Loss of a sense of place has powerfully

restricted and inhibited narrative flow, tension, mystery, and personality. And narrative

power is intimately connected to a sense of place. Mrs. Fullerton says, "My boys wanted me to

sell then and go and live in rooms. But I said no. I had my hens and a nanny goat too at that

time. More or less a pet. I had a pet coon too for a while and used to feed him chewing gum.

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Well, I said, husbands may come and go, but a place you've lived fifty years is something else.

(Emphasis added)." 58 Mary herself is used to long stories and understands a sense of place------

Munro implies that Mary has a rural background similar to Mrs. Fullerton’s:

“And Mary found herself exploring her neighbor`s life as she had once explored the lives of grandmothers and aunts---by pretending to know less than she did, asking for some story she had heard before; this way, remembered episodes emerged each time with slight differences of content, meaning, colour, yet with a pure reality that usually attaches to things which are at least part legend.”59

In Garden Place, Mary is sort of a `spy for the other side`. Her loyalties are with Mrs. Fullerton.

Munro thus provides a space in the cosmos---her fiction---where the harshness of the

thermodynamic realities of life may be reflected on and turned over in the privacy of one`s own

mind, perhaps with conclusions mirroring Mary`s growing understanding and horror. The blithe

suburbanites` victory is so total yet marked out in this story as utterly temporary, trivial on a

cosmic scale, yet devastating on a human one..

“Dulse” (1980) and “Post and Beam” (2000)

In “The Shining Houses” Mary`s husband does not speak or appear. He`s not at the

party, or at least not mentioned as being there, so he can`t take sides for or against the

suburbanites` position. Like Sherlock Holmes` famous clue of the dog that didn`t bark in the

night, the husband`s absence indicates something important: Munro may not have yet figured

out how to explore the full impact of a modernizing economy on the inner lives of her

characters. Later she would skillfully create situations that laid bare the characters` loyalties and

prejudices with respect to country life as opposed to modern notions of wealth. She would use

these ideas to create tension and inner drama.Two examples from many later occurrences

follow, although there are more.

In “Dulse” (July, 1980) a character named Vincent (a later incarnation of Mrs.

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Fullerton) “had a farm—it was his family`s farm, where he had grown up, near St. Stephen. He

said you couldn`t make enough to keep you nowadays, just from farming….the market is all

controlled now, it is all run by the big fellows, the big interests” 60 Lydia, the main character , an

editor and a poet from Toronto, is getting over a broken heart (she had been in a depressing

relationship with a cruel but witty and successful man named Duncan who has an apartment in

the city). Lydia considers what it would have been like if she had stayed in the rural town she

grew up in and married a local:

“With (Vincent) she could foresee doors opening, to what she knew and had forgotten; rooms and landscapes opening; there. The rainy evenings, a country with creeks and graveyards, and chokeberry and finches in the fence corners……should she have concentrated on the part that would have been content with such an arrangement and forgotten about the rest?”61

Duncan and Vincent are strongly contrasted, one cruel, intelligent, the other

uneducated, patient, ironic. Duncan is a later, more intellectual version of the successful

suburban husbands in “The Shining Houses”, while Vincent is a touchstone whose amusing and

folksy stories of country living help Lydia to regain her lost sense of self and get over her

emotional scars incurred by her unhealthy relationship with Duncan.

In “Post and Beam” (Dec. 2000), Lorna is from rural Ontario but lives in the suburbs

of British Columbia and is married to a pretentious, bossy and successful mathematics

professor, Brendan, who is proud of his elegant “post and beam” “contemporary” 62suburban

house , and is surely another incarnation of the suburban husbands in “The Shining Houses”.

Lorna finds psychic freedom when her cousin Polly, who still lives on the same farm where

Lorna grew up, visits and causes Brendan to get impatient with her long and winding

conversational style. Polly (a more complex version of Mrs. Fullerton) has chosen to remain

single, to live a hard life of poverty in rural Ontario, and her independent though materially

circumscribed life gives Lorna a chance to think about freeing alternatives available to her in

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the future, such as “shaping this story to be told to somebody…as an entertainment”63 (that is

she’ll become a writer) which is what Munro herself chose.

“Dulse” and “Post and Beam” are particularly notable because the main character is or

will become a fiction writer, like Munro herself. Contact with the rural countryside---like a

talisman--- via Vincent and cousin Polly, both liberates and stimulates the main characters,

providing the necessary expansive frame of mind and perspective on life to write. But we can

say this idea began with Mrs. Fullerton telling her long stories; Mary is not a writer but she

appreciates stories and knows how to get Mrs. Fullerton ---and her own country relatives---to

tell her their stories.

As an early effort, “The Shining Houses” presents, without too many artful and

distracting complications, the basic scene—the social scene engendered by the underlying

energetic exigencies—that concerned Munro in her formative years and adulthood. Later

stories are often more complex, refined and interesting arrangements that still share the basic

conundrum (what should human beings do with all the oil and the energy therein) expressed in

“The Shining Houses” and can be understood as such. Munro understands that we must follow

the sun, or the stored energy (petroleum) which the sun has made available. Making the choice

to pursue wealth and success in the cities or suburbs with vehemence and single-mindedness

may change us inside, though, giving us more than we had bargained for. In Munro`s opinion

perhaps the changes, though exciting and inexorable, may bring new problems.

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1 Martin, W.R. Alice Munro Paradox and Parallel (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1987), p. 362 Ibid. p. 36.3 Munro, Alice, “The Shining Houses” in Dance of the Happy Shades (NY, NY: Viking Penguin, reprinted 1984), p.244 Ibid, p. 23.5 Ibid. p. 23.6 Ibid. p. 247 Ibid. p. 26.8 Ibid. p. 28.9 Ibid.10 Ibid. p. 27.11 Ibid. p. 29.12 In Dance of the Happy Shades, Munro`s story “Boys and Girls” explains that the foxes on the farm of the narrator were fed horsemeat from horses that neighboring farmers no longer needed (the horses might be old, too sick, or made redundant by the newer tractors, according to the narrator), Munro also describes the manual work on this fictional farm in detail.13 Tainter, Joseph A., The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, U.K.; Cambridge U. Press, 1988), p. 114 Ibid. p. 91.15 Munro, p. 2416 “EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) is the rate of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy source to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource. When EROEI of a resource is equal to or lower than one, that resource becomes an energy sink and can no longer be used as a primary source of energy……A society will generally exploit the highest available EROEI sources first as they provide the most energy for the least effort. For example, when oil was originally discovered (about 100 years ago) it took on average one barrel of oil to find extract and process about 100 barrels of oil. That ratio has declined steadily over the last century to about three barrels gained for one used up in the U.S. and about 10 for one in Saudi Arabia.” (from Wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI) Also, following are some basic EROEI (also called shorthand EROI) numbers for other energy-acquisition strategies: Hunter Gatherer (basic EROEI ratio)= 10:1; Farmer, Horse and Plow & Pre-Industrial Transportation= 10-20-1; High-Tech Farmer&Modern Distribution-Transportation=1:16; all EROEI data from “A Preliminary Investigation of Energy Returned on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas Production” by Nathan Gagnon, Charles A.S. Hall, and Lysle Brinker, Energies 2009, pages 490-503) and “What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have?”, by Charles A.S. Hall, Stephen Balogh, and David J.R. Murphy, Energies 2009, 2(1), pages 25-47.From the notes, the High-tech farmer & Modern transportation energy capturing strategy uses 16 units of (oil) energy to capture one unit of (food) energy. This is possibly Munro`s basic concern----running an energy deficit is fine as long as the oil lasts.17 Tainter, p. 91.18 Munro, p. 24.19 Munro, p. 29.20 Tainter, p. 198.21 Ibid.22 Munro, p. 23 (emphasis added).23 Munro, p. 22.24 Munro, p. 24.25 Munro, p. 24.26 Tainter, p. 194.27 Munro, p. 23.28 Munro, p. 27.29 Munro, p. 23.30 Tainter, p. 201.31 Munro, p. 26.32 Munro, p. 22.33 Munro, p. 26.

34 Schneider, Eric D. and Sagan, Dorian, Into the Cool; Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life (Chicago, IL; University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. xii.35 The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in a system, a process that occurs will tend to increase the total entropy of the universe.36 Schneider and Sagan, p. xvii.37 Schneider and Sagan, p. 146.38 Ibid, p. 279.39 Ibid, p. 29940 Ibid. p 29941 Munro, p. 29.42 Ibid, p.147.43 Schneider and Sagan, p. 279.44 Scheider and Sagan, p. 295 (emphasis added.).45 Munro, p. 29.46 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971) p. 283.47 Munro, p. 29.48 “In the long run, the foolish choices will be weeded out as, again, maximal gradient reduction may power short-term growth but may not be sustainable over the long term”. Into the Cool, p. 298.49 Kunstler, James Howard The Long Emergency (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) p. 1750 Jackson, Kenneth T, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (NY,NY: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 304.51 Ibid., p. 297.52 Kunstler, J.H. The Geography of Nowhere (NY,NY: Simon and Schuster, 1993) p.12453 “The known global reserves of petroleum are expected to last roughly another thirty years. This means that in the lifetimes of most Americans living today, the essential fuel that has powered the suburban-consumer way of life will no longer be available,” (p. 112) JH Kunstler The Geography of Nowhere.54Munro, p.i.55 Munro, p.21.56 Munro, p.2057 Munro, p. 25.58 Munro, p.21.59 Munro, p. 19.60 Munro, Alice “Dulse” in The Moons of Jupiter (Toronto, Canada: Penguin Books Canada (1995) p. 46.61 Ibid. p. 5262 Ibid. p. 198.63 Ibid, p. 217.