At the very end of Alice Munro’s “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” thirteen-year-old Colin sits on top of an old iron bridge spanning the Tiplady River and has an epiphany. He has climbed up to this precarious perch because he fears—or, believes—that he has accidentally shot his younger brother, Ross. He was only trying to keep the gun out of Ross’s hands, but somehow it went off, and Ross fell. Colin saw, or thought he saw, blood pooling. But it turns out that Ross is fine; the bullet passed nowhere near him. He was only acting, or maybe startled, when the gun fired, and now here he is, lit up by car headlights and “looking cheerful and slightly apprehensive, but not really apologetic.” And Colin looks at him and thinks of the accident—though no accident actually occurred—and the epiphany descends: “He knew that to watch out for something like that happening—to Ross, and to himself—was going to be his job in life from then on.”

Not the same as Colin’s bridge in the story, but how I pictured it: the bridge in Tweed, Ontario, where we used to eat ice cream at dusk. (That’s me on the right, celebrating my 11th birthday.)

I have thought a great deal over the years about what makes an Alice Munro story so powerful, and I believe now that the answer might lie, at least in part, in those three words in the middle of that epiphanic sentence, “and to himself.” They seem like an afterthought, and yet they are integral both to the symmetry of the sentence (eleven words precede the opening dash and eleven words follow the closing dash—in case anyone’s wondering how to win the Nobel Prize) and to the emotion that the story conveys. Another answer lies, I think, in a key symbol in “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” a car engine that might or might not be too big for the body in which it has been placed—that might, if it is indeed too powerful, shatter the drive shaft, causing the whole car to flip and placing the driver in unspeakable danger. Or it might not. Three words and the signification of an engine: these—in Munro, for me—say it all.

**

I first encountered Alice Munro on a bus in Australia when I was twelve. She wasn’t on the bus, unfortunately, but one of her books was. An older girl sitting a few rows behind me—we were a children’s choir on tour—was reading The Love of a Good Woman. I thought that it was incredibly grown up (a status I was loosely interested in attaining, at least as far as literature was concerned) to be reading a book with “woman” in the title. The cover featured a sepia-toned photograph of two people in a canoe. I was pretty sure I had seen my parents reading it, and I was suddenly impatient to get back to the right side of the globe and see if it was on their shelves. I remember thinking quite distinctly, as we rumbled through the streets of downtown Sydney: here is the person I want to be. Not the “woman,” maybe—not yet—but the kind of girl who would read about her.

In the years since then, I have often said that I found it difficult to read too many Munro stories in a row because they are so emotionally exhausting. This might have been an excuse, or it might have been true. But I did read her, assiduously throughout high school, and with a sense of confidence-rattling awe throughout university. Her depictions of 1970s and 80s womanhood in Canada, along with Margaret Atwood’s more dramatic and urban versions, defined my whole understanding of adult life for a long time. Sometimes I wonder if some part of me is still waiting to find myself in a certain kitchen, on a certain porch, dialling a certain old telephone and driving a certain old car—still assuming that I will inevitably end up there.

From Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) on, I received most of Munro’s books in hardcover as gifts, as they came out. I read the title story of that collection in full one Christmas afternoon—I suppose I would have been fourteen—stretched diagonally on my stomach across my parents’ bed and eating licorice. (I was, more specifically, breathing in and out through each licorice straw until it disintegrated and trying not to drool on any pages. Make what you will of the symbolism of that.) I still picture all train stations like the tiny, rural one Johanna visits in the opening pages of that book; incidentally it was, to my mind, the same train station where Matthew picked up Anne before taking her home to Green Gables. Fourteen years—exactly twice a lifetime—later, I taught “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” also from Hateship, in my first Can Lit class. I have now taught it several times, always to general appreciation. The children’s song that inspired the title, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”—sung to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”—will be in my head for days. (But why did Munro change it from “went” to “came”? Take my class to find out!)

Munro collection just visible on the lower shelf beside my shoulder, including (my parents’ copy of) The Love of a Good Woman.

Today, my personal Munro collection is robust enough that I store various valuable documents under and around it on my shelves. I have read more than enough of her work to utter platitudes, like a good Canadian, about her deft Chekhovian touch and the literary-historical significance of her attention to southwestern Ontario. But a few years ago I was at a small dinner party with five English professors—just me and them; I was a PhD student at the time; this felt exactly as you would imagine it to—and the conversation drifted to “favourite Alice Munro stories.” To my horror, I came up short. I was months away from becoming a fully fledged Doctor of Canadian Literature and I couldn’t think of a single one. Or, I could, but I couldn’t remember the title. I remembered one scene (a young woman naked in a strange man’s house), but not what the rest of the story was about. And so I offered my one insight—“They’re too emotionally exhausting,” I faltered, emotionally exhausted—and wondered if the armchair I was sitting in might be so kind as just to swallow me up until the evening was over.

(The favourite, by the way, was “Wenlock Edge,” from Too Much Happiness; oh, like the Housman poem, said one of the professors, when I had finally groped my way to this conclusion; yes, exactly, I said, like an English PhD student who might or might not have forgotten about Housman’s existence.)

And so this past year I set out to ensure that I would never be in that nightmarish situation again. I devoured five full Munro collections over the summer: The Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), The Progress of Love (1986), and Friend of My Youth (1990). I now carry favourites around like a stack of business cards. And maybe the earlier stories from these books are shorter and thus less demanding than the later ones I had read first, or maybe (preferably) my capacity to process complex emotions has evolved, but I didn’t find it exhausting at all. In fact, I found the reading restorative. Maybe, it’s sort of fun to think (though this is far too tidy for any Munro story, ever), I’m finally becoming the grown-up I thought Munro would make me all those years ago on the bus.

**

“Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” first published in 1985 and then collected in The Progress of Love, is about the all-consuming sense of duty—which is actually love—that Colin feels for his brother Ross. Ross, we learn early on, displays symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome: he is so skilled at fixing cars that his mother calls him “a genius of the mechanical kind,” and yet he also has “the other side of a genius”—he is, to put it bluntly, “weird.” Fittingly, then, he enters the story literally wearing two hats, a floppy pink straw hat on top of his seedcorn cap, and Colin is called upon—as it is clear he has been many times before—to “provide explanations.” But Colin is baffled by his brother’s double nature. Ross, it seems to Colin, has “an expression that seem[s] both leering and innocent.” Is there something sinister about him? Are his “odd getups” and uncomfortable outbursts “calculated … with an audience in mind”? Or is he, like a child, to be admired, even envied, for his happy ignorance of social norms and the untainted mode of existence this implies?

Colin’s confusion stems in part from the childhood trauma with the gun, which for Ross was only a joke, a performance, and not a trauma at all. That experience seeded in Colin a complicated mixture of guilt, exasperation, resentment, attachment, and protectiveness towards Ross which has grown into an unwieldy emotional burden. And now, in the present tense, he is confronted with a fresh danger:  Nancy, a newcomer to town—and treated with both reverence and skepticism for that reason—has taken Colin aside to tell him that the engine Ross is building into his latest fixer-upper is too big and will certainly break the car: it will be a “fatal mistake,” she insists. Colin spends much of the story trying to determine whether she is right.

Notably, at no point is Ross in any actual danger; the danger is always a threat, a potentiality. Colin had been certain that if Ross got “his hands on [the] gun, loaded or not, it would explode,” and so “[t]o prevent such a thing happening, Colin grabbed it himself.” This fear is unfounded (how would the gun explode if it were not loaded?), but Colin is guided by instinct, not logic. The final line of the story, Colin’s bridge-top epiphany, repeats the earlier wording almost exactly: Colin “knew that to watch out for something like that happening—to Ross, and to himself—was going to be his job in life from then on.”

“Something like that,” “such a thing,” might never “happen.” Indeed, as he contemplates the possible threat of the engine, Colin is aware that Ross knows far more about cars than he does; is it really likely that he would make such an error in judgment? Ross might not need any watching out for, but—and more importantly—Colin needs to watch out for him. Those three crucial Munro-defining words, “and to himself,” disclose Colin’s vague yet profound sense of their shared destiny. The brothers are, together, “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux”: one man, two hats; if something terrible happens to the one, something equally terrible happens to the other. That is what makes the feeling at the core of this story not merely duty, not merely familial responsibility, but love.

And love, of course, is not pure, and it can be burdensome. Colin’s love for Ross is mingled with fear and guilt, and sometimes seems motivated by an insensitive act, a silly hoax. But in all its complexity and unpredictability, this love, for Colin, is like the engine that is—or might be—too powerful for the car. Put slightly differently, Ross himself might be like the car engine in the carefully ordered structure of Colin’s life. If Ross were to explode, somehow, or to come to harm, Colin’s whole world would flip on its axis.

**

This, then, is the force of an Alice Munro story: the subtle rendering of an emotion so complex and powerful that it threatens to crush the body that holds it. The three words, “and to himself,” in their perfectly symmetrical sentence, emblematize the grace of Munro’s touch, and the engine symbolizes not only the particular variety of love in “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” but the intricate and overwhelming feeling that powers all of her stories. In a general sense, Munro’s characters all wrestle—as Colin does, too—with their affectionate protectiveness of a past they have made every effort to escape. Her seamless modulations of point of view whisper of their confusions and delusions, and in story after story, the hazy border between what is real and what is imagined grows hazier still as family secrets bleed into small-town gossip.

But more on that another day. There will be more bus rides; there is plenty more growing up to do. For now, I think, it is best to let the tired engine rest.

Trying to read like a real grown-up since 1991.