The View from Castle Rock: Stories by Alice Munro Reviewed by Deborah Eisenberg
The Atlantic Monthly
"With The View From Castle Rock, Alice Munro exercises what is apparently something of an inherited disposition: the desire, or compulsion, to record. She says of a distant forebear, the writer James Hogg, that he 'was both insider and outsider, industriously and he hoped profitably shaping and recording his people's stories There would be some trimming and embroidering of material Some canny lying of the sort you can depend upon a writer to do.' Munro, too, has had the uncomfortable advantage of being both an insider and ? after leaving the centuries-long rural life of her ancestors for a university education and the city ? an outsider...." Read the entire Atlantic Monthly review.