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Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership. At the risk of sounding like a pleader on behalf of yet another underappreciated writer -- and maybe you've learned to recognize and evade these pleas? The same way you've learned not to open bulk mail from certain charities? Please give generously to Dawn Powell? Your contribution of just 15 minutes a week can help assure Joseph Roth of his rightful place in the modern canon? -- I want to circle around Munro's latest marvel of a book, ''Runaway,'' by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame. 很多人强烈认定爱丽丝·门罗(Alice Munro)是现居北美的小说家中最好的一个，她的书虽然在加拿大高踞畅销榜首位，但在加拿大以外的地方却从未拥有广泛的读者群。我的话听起来，好像是一个同为不受赏识的作家在为她辩护——也许你已经知道该怎样认出这样的辩解，并且不去读它，就像不会去读某些慈善组织的群发邮件一样：“请为多恩·鲍威尔(Dawn Powell)慷慨解囊”，“每周花15分钟就能帮约瑟夫·罗斯(Joseph Roth)保住现代文学经典的地位”——但我还是要好好谈谈门罗惊人的新书《逃离》(Runaway)，并且推测一下为何她如此优秀，却远未能获得与之相称的名声。
1. Munro's work is all about storytelling pleasure.The problem here being that many buyers of serious fiction seem rather ardently to prefer lyrical, tremblingly earnest, faux-literary stuff. 其一，门罗的作品全部都是关于讲故事的快乐。问题在于许多严肃小说的购买者似乎更喜欢感情丰富、热情洋溢的伪文学玩意儿。 2. As long as you're reading Munro, you're failing to multitask by absorbing civics lessons or historical data. Her subject is people. People people people. If you read fiction about some enriching subject like Renaissance art or an important chapter in our nation's history, you can be assured of feeling productive. But if the story is set in the modern world, and if the characters' concerns are familiar to you, and if you become so involved with a book that you can't put it down at bedtime, there exists a risk that you're merely being entertained. 其二，读门罗没法一举多得，她的书当不了公民课程或历史数据。她的主题就是关于人。人，人，还是人。读那种主题内容丰富的小说，比如关于文艺复兴时期艺术，或者关于我们国家历史上的某个重要时期，肯定会觉得获益匪浅。但如果小说中的故事发生在现代世界，如果人物的心态都是你所熟悉的，如果你开始迷上一本书，想要废寝忘食地读它，那么就要冒一定的风险：这本书可能不仅仅是娱乐你。
3. She doesn't give her books grand titles like ''Canadian Pastoral,'' ''Canadian Psycho,'' ''Purple Canada,'' ''In Canada'' or ''The Plot Against Canada.'' Also, she refuses to render vital dramatic moments in convenient discursive summary. Also, her rhetorical restraint and her excellent ear for dialogue and her almost pathological empathy for her characters have the costly effect of obscuring her authorial ego for many pages at a stretch. Also, her jacket photos show her smiling pleasantly, as if the reader were a friend, rather than wearing the kind of woeful scowl that signifies really serious literary intent. 其三，她并没有给自己的书取什么宏大的名字，诸如“加拿大牧歌”、“加拿大精神病人”、“紫色加拿大”、“在加拿大”，或“加拿大阴谋”之类。同时她也拒绝在推介书摘中加入生死攸关时刻的戏剧性描述。此外，她克制的文风、对对话精彩的捕捉，以及对笔下人物近乎病态的移情能力，都使得她的作家人格要到故事开展很久之后才能浮现出来。最后，在书封的照片上，她愉快地微笑着，仿佛读者是朋友一般；并没有刻意面露惨痛愁容，强调自己的严肃文学身份。 4. The Swedish Royal Academy is taking a firm stand. Evidently, the feeling in Stockholm is that too many Canadians and too many pure short-story writers have already been given the Nobel. Enough is enough! 其四：瑞典皇家学会立场很坚定，斯德哥尔摩方面显然觉得拿过诺贝尔文学奖的加拿大人太多，纯文学短篇小说作家太多。足够了就是足够了。 5. Munro writes fiction, and fiction is harder to review than nonfiction. Here's Bill Clinton, he's written a book about himself, and how interesting. How interesting. The author himself is interesting -- can there be a better qualification for writing a book about Bill Clinton than actually being Bill Clinton? -- and then, too, everybody has an opinion about Bill Clinton and wonders what Bill Clinton says and doesn't say in his new book about himself, and how Bill Clinton spins this and refutes that, and before you know it the review has practically written itself. 其五，门罗写的是虚构文学，这比评论非虚构文学来得困难。你看，这是比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)，他写了一本自传，多有意思啊。怎么这么有意思呢？作者本人就很有意思——写一本关于比尔·克林顿的书，还有人比克林顿本人更有资格吗？——而且，对于比尔·克林顿，每个人都有自己的看法，每个人都在想，克林顿在关于自己的新书里会说什么，不会说什么，会编造什么，驳斥什么，不等你动手，心里就已经不知不觉地在写书评了。 But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences. And since I'm not interested in reviewing her new book's marketing campaign or in being entertainingly snarky at her expense, and since I'm reluctant to talk about the concrete meaning of her new work, because this is difficult to do without revealing too much plot, I'm probably better off just serving up a nice quote for Alfred A. Knopf to pull -- ''Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. 'Runaway' is a marvel'' -- and suggesting to the Book Review's editors that they run the biggest possible photograph of Munro in the most prominent of places, plus a few smaller photos of mildly prurient interest (her kitchen? her children?) and maybe a quote from one of her rare interviews -- ''Because there is this kind of exhaustion and bewilderment when you look at your work. . . . All you really have left is the thing you're working on now. And so you're much more thinly clothed. You're like somebody out in a little shirt or something, which is just the work you're doing now and the strange identification with everything you've done before. And this probably is why I don't take any public role as a writer. Because I can't see myself doing that except as a gigantic fraud'' -- and just leave it at that. 但是爱丽丝·门罗又是何许人也？她只在遥远的地方提供令人愉快的私人体验。我不想评论她新书的市场营销策略，或是说些要由她埋单的讽刺言语；我也不大愿意评论她新作的具体内容，因为这样就会暴露太多情节，我最好还是只引用一句阿尔弗莱德·A·克诺普夫(Alfred A. Knopf)的评价：“很多人都强烈认定爱丽丝·门罗是现居北美的小说家中最好的一个，《逃离》是个奇迹”，同时我还建议《纽约时报》书评的编辑们最好把门罗的照片以最大尺寸放在版面的最显著位置，再加上几张稍微挑逗点的小照片（她的厨房，她的孩子），或者从她为数不多的访谈中找几句引语放上去——“因为当你看着自己的作品时，会产生枯竭和困惑的感觉……,你留下的只有当下致力完成的东西。你好像穿得比别人少，好像只身着一件小汗衫就出门去，你此时此刻的作品就是这样，以前的作品所获得的奇怪认同也是如此。或许这就是为什么我不愿意充当作家这个公众角色，因为我不觉得自己能胜任，除非变成一个大骗子”——这样就可以了。 6. Because, worse yet, Munro is a pure short-story writer. And with short stories the challenge to reviewers is even more extreme. Is there a story in all of world literature whose appeal can survive the typical synopsis? (A chance meeting on a boardwalk in Yalta brings together a bored husband and a lady with a little dog. . . . A small town's annual lottery is revealed to serve a rather surprising purpose. . . . A middle-aged Dubliner leaves a party and reflects on life and love. . . .) Oprah Winfrey will not touch story collections. Discussing them is so challenging, indeed, that one can almost forgive this Book Review's former editor, Charles McGrath, for his recent comparison of young short-story writers to ''people who learn golf by never venturing onto a golf course but instead practicing at a driving range.'' The real game being, by this analogy, the novel. 其六，更糟糕的是，门罗只写短篇小说。短篇小说对于评论家来说可谓难上加难。整个世界文学中，有没有一个短篇小说经得起典型的“一句话梗概”？诸如“一个厌倦的已婚男人与一个带小狗的女人在雅尔塔的步行道上偶遇的故事”、“一个小镇上的年度彩票开奖暴露出惊人的目的”、“一个中年都柏林人离开派对，思考人生与爱的真谛”……奥普拉·温弗瑞(Oprah Winfrey)从来不做短篇小说集。讨论它们确实太难，简直令人可以原谅《纽约时报》书评的前任编辑查尔斯·麦克格雷斯(Charles McGrath)最近把年轻的短篇小说作家比作“不敢上正式场地，只敢上练球场的高尔夫球学习者”。他的逻辑就是，只有长篇小说才算正经事。 McGrath's prejudice is shared by nearly all commercial publishers, for whom a story collection is, most frequently, the distasteful front-end write-off in a two-book deal whose back end is contractually forbidden to be another story collection. And yet, despite the short story's Cinderella status, or maybe because of it, a high percentage of the most exciting fiction written in the last 25 years -- the stuff I immediately mention if somebody asks me what's terrific -- has been short fiction. There's the Great One herself, naturally. There's also Lydia Davis, David Means, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel and the late Raymond Carver -- all of them pure or nearly pure short-story writers -- and then a larger group of writers who have achievements in multiple genres (John Updike, Joy Williams, David Foster Wallace, Joyce Carol Oates, Denis Johnson, Ann Beattie, William T. Vollmann, Tobias Wolff, Annie Proulx, Michael Chabon, Tom Drury, the late Andre Dubus) but who seem to me most at home, most undilutedly themselves, in their shorter work. There are also, to be sure, some very fine pure novelists. But when I close my eyes and think about literature in recent decades, I see a twilight landscape in which many of the most inviting lights, the sites that beckon me to return for a visit, are shed by particular short stories I've read. 所有商业出版社都有和麦克格雷斯同样的偏见，对于他们来说，短篇小说集通常都是两本书的合同中令人不快的第一本，合同中会明令规定，第二本无论如何不能再出短篇小说集了。然而，尽管短篇小说是没人疼爱的灰姑娘，或许也正是出于这个原因，近25年来令人兴奋的小说（如果有人让我推荐什么精彩的东西，这方面我马上就能如数家珍）里有很大一部分都是短篇小说。当然，其中包括门罗本人，还有莉迪亚·戴维斯(Lydia Davis)、大卫·敏恩斯(David Means)、乔治·桑德斯(George Saunders)、洛丽·摩尔(Lorrie Moore)、艾米·亨佩尔(Amy Hempel)和故去的雷蒙德·卡佛(Raymond Carver)，他们都是只写，或者几乎只写短篇小说。此外还有约翰·厄普代克(John Updike)、乔伊·威廉姆斯(Joy Williams)、大卫·福斯特·华莱士(David Foster Wallace)、乔伊斯·卡罗尔·奥茨(Joyce Carol Oates)、丹尼斯·约翰逊(Denis Johnson)、安·贝蒂(Ann Beattie)、威廉·T·沃尔曼(William T. Vollmann)、托拜厄斯·伍尔夫(Tobias Wolff)、安妮·普鲁克斯(Annie Proulx)、迈克尔·查邦(Michael Chabon)、汤姆·德鲁里(Tom Drury)和已故的安德鲁·杜伯斯(Andre Dubus)等更多作家，他们虽然在多种领域取得成就，但在我看来，他们在短篇小说中展现的才是最亲切、最纯粹的自我。当然，也有很多出色的作家只写长篇小说。但当我闭上眼睛，在心中历数近几十年来的文学成就，只看见许多壮丽光源的暮年余晖，它们示意我回头再度拜访，但与某些短篇小说相形之下黯然失色。 I like stories because they leave the writer no place to hide. There's no yakking your way out of trouble; I'm going to be reaching the last page in a matter of minutes, and if you've got nothing to say I'm going to know it. I like stories because they're usually set in the present or in living memory; the genre seems to resist the historical impulse that makes so many contemporary novels feel fugitive or cadaverous. I like stories because it takes the best kind of talent to invent fresh characters and situations while telling the same story over and over. All fiction writers suffer from the condition of having nothing new to say, but story writers are the ones most abjectly prone to this condition. There is, again, no hiding. The craftiest old dogs, like Munro and William Trevor, don't even try. 我喜欢短篇小说是因为它们让作者无从躲藏。在短篇小说里，作家不能靠长篇大论来摆脱困境。我在几分钟内就能读完一篇短篇小说，假如作者言之无物，我马上就能看出来；我喜欢短篇小说，也是因为它们通常都发生在此时此刻，或是发生在活灵活现的记忆里。这个种类似乎特别抗拒历史考据的冲动，正是这种历史感令许多当代长篇小说显得苍白枯槁，转瞬即逝；我喜欢短篇小说，是因为它最能体现作家一遍一遍重复相同的故事，同时又创造新鲜角色与情景的才能。所有虚构类作家都会经历没有新鲜事可说的困境，但短篇小说作家最容易悲惨地落入这种境地。这同样无从躲藏逃避。像门罗和威廉·特雷弗(William Trevor)这样最狡猾的老家伙们甚至根本就不会试着去逃避。 HERE'S the story that Munro keeps telling: A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the girl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self-interested act. She marries young, moves to British Columbia, raises kids, and is far from blameless in the breakup of her marriage. She may have success as an actress or a writer or a TV personality; she has romantic adventures. When, inevitably, she returns to Ontario, she finds the landscape of her youth unsettlingly altered. Although she was the one who abandoned the place, it's a great blow to her narcissism that she isn't warmly welcomed back -- that the world of her youth, with its older-fashioned manners and mores, now sits in judgment on the modern choices she has made. Simply by trying to survive as a whole and independent person, she has incurred painful losses and dislocations; she has caused harm. 门罗一直都在讲述这样一个故事：一个聪明、性欲旺盛，没什么钱的女孩在安大略乡村长大，母亲不是病着就是死了，父亲是学校教师，续弦妻子也大有问题，这个女孩总是一有机会就尽快逃离这个穷乡僻壤，不是通过求学就是通过其他什么关键性的利己主义途径。她年轻早婚，搬去卑诗省，抚养孩子，在婚姻破裂中自然不是全无责任。最后她可能会成功当上一个女演员或作家或者电视明星；她会有浪漫的冒险。不可避免地，她会回到安大略，发现年轻时熟悉的风景已经令人不安地彻底改变。尽管她当初离弃了故乡，但如今故乡没有温暖地迎接她，对于她的自恋情结来说不啻为沉重一击。她年轻时的世界，那些老式利益和道德，在她所选择的现代化世界面前，显得岌岌可危。她只想作为一个完整独立的人而活下去，却经受了痛苦的损失与错位；她造成了伤害。 And that's pretty much it. That's the little stream that's been feeding Munro's work for better than 50 years. The same elements recur and recur like Clare Quilty. What makes Munro's growth as an artist so crisply and breathtakingly visible -- throughout the ''Selected Stories'' and even more so in her three latest books -- is precisely the familiarity of her materials. Look what she can do with nothing but her own small story; the more she returns to it, the more she finds. 差不多就是这样。这就是50多年来滋养着门罗创作的涓涓细流。同样的元素就像克莱尔·奎尔蒂（Clare Quilty，《洛丽塔》中的人物——译注）那样一再重现。门罗对自己素材的熟悉程度令她在艺术上的成长显得如此清晰爽快，激动人心，通过《短篇小说选》(Selected Stories)，乃至最新的三本书都可以看出来。看吧，仅仅是靠着自己的小故事，她就可以创造出多少东西，她愈是回到这些素材，就能找到愈多东西。 This is not a golfer on a practice tee. This is a gymnast in a plain black leotard, alone on a bare floor, outperforming all the novelists with their flashy costumes and whips and elephants and tigers. 她不是一个穿着练习装的高尔夫球手，而是一个穿着黑色紧身衣的体操运动员，独自在空荡荡的体育馆里。却胜过了长篇小说作家们那些花里胡哨的戏服、长鞭、大象和老虎们。 ''The complexity of things -- the things within things -- just seems to be endless,'' Munro told her interviewer. ''I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.'' “事物的复杂性，即蕴含在事物之中的事物，似乎无穷无尽，”门罗曾在采访中说，“我的意思是，没有任何事是轻松简单的。” SHE was stating the fundamental axiom of literature, the core of its appeal. And, for whatever reason -- the fragmentation of my reading time, the distractions and atomizations of contemporary life or, perhaps, a genuine paucity of compelling novels -- I find that when I'm in need of a hit of real writing, a good stiff drink of paradox and complexity, I'm likeliest to encounter it in short fiction. Besides ''Runaway,'' the most compelling contemporary fiction I've read in recent months has been Wallace's stories in ''Oblivion'' and a stunner of a collection by the British writer Helen Simpson. Simpson's book, a series of comic shrieks on the subject of modern motherhood, was published originally as ''Hey Yeah Right Get a Life'' -- a title you would think needed no improvement. But the book's American packagers set to work improving it, and what did they come up with? ''Getting a Life.'' Consider this dismal gerund the next time you hear an American publisher insisting that story collections never sell. 她是在阐述文学中最基本的公理，文学魅力的核心。不管出于什么原因，或许是由于我利用零碎时间阅读，或许是由于现代生活中有那么多琐碎和分心的事，又或许是因为真正引人入胜的长篇小说太少，当我需要从真正的写作中获得震撼，畅饮悖论与复杂的快感时，还是最有可能在短篇小说中获得这些东西。除了《逃离》，近几个月来我读过的最扣人心弦的当代虚构写作是华莱士在《遗忘》(Oblivion)中的几个短篇小说，以及英国作家海伦·辛普森(Helen Simpson)绝妙的选集。辛普森的小说以现代社会中的母亲为主题，是一系列富于喜剧色彩的尖叫，原本的书名叫《嘿耶快来把握生活》('Hey Yeah Right Get a Life)，这名字会让你觉得简直没法再改得更好了。但它的美国包装者们却偏要改，猜猜他们改成了什么——《把握生活》(Getting a Life)。下次当你听到美国出版商抱怨短篇小说集根本卖不出去，就想想这个倒霉的书名吧。 7. Munro's short stories are even harder to review than other people's short stories. 其七，门罗的短篇小说甚至比其他人的短篇小说更难评论。 More than any writer since Chekhov, Munro strives for and achieves, in each of her stories, a gestaltlike completeness in the representation of a life. She always had a genius for developing and unpacking moments of epiphany. But it's in the three collections since ''Selected Stories'' (1996) that she's taken the really big, world-class leap and become a master of suspense. The moments she's pursuing now aren't moments of realization; they're moments of fateful, irrevocable, dramatic action. And what this means for the reader is you can't even begin to guess at a story's meaning until you've followed every twist; it's always the last page or two that switches all lights on. 自从契诃夫(Chekhov)以来，没有任何作家像门罗这样，在每个短篇小说里都力争并且达到了一种对生活的完满呈现。她一直具备一种天赋，去逐步发展并最终吐露那种顿悟的时刻。但在她自1996年的《短篇小说选》之后的三本选集里，她有了真正的世界级重大飞跃，成了悬念大师。如今她所追求的不再是领悟的时刻，而是不可挽回的、宿命的，戏剧性行为的时刻。对于读者来说，意味着不读完故事中的每一个转折，就根本无从猜测小说的意义究竟是什么；通常直到全文最后一两页，才会真相大白。 Meanwhile, as her narrative ambitions have grown, she's become ever less interested in showing off. Her early work was full of big rhetoric, eccentric detail, arresting phrases. (Check out her 1977 story ''Royal Beatings.'') But as her stories have come to resemble classical tragedies in prose form, it's not only as if she no longer has room for inessentials, it's as if it would be actively jarring, mood-puncturing -- an aesthetic and moral betrayal -- for her writerly ego to intrude on the pure story. 与此同时，她的叙事野心也开始增长，对炫技不再感兴趣。她的早期作品中充满华丽的修辞、古怪的细节和引人注意的短语（参见她1977年的短篇小说《庄严的悸动》[Royal Beatings]）。但如今她的小说开始变得更贴近散文体的古典悲剧，她的小说里不仅再没有冗余之物的容身之地，这些多余的东西也似乎会妨碍她的创作自我深入到纯正的故事中去，会显得十分不和谐，破坏气氛，成为一种美学和道德上的背叛。 Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I've made, the things I've done and haven't done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death. She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion. For as long as I'm immersed in a Munro story, I am according to an entirely make-believe character the kind of solemn respect and quiet rooting interest that I accord myself in my better moments as a human being. 读门罗的小说让我陷入静静的深思，反省自己的人生：那些我所做过的决定、我所做过的和没做过的事情、我的性格，乃至我对死亡的看法。当我宣称虚构文学是我的信仰时，她是浮现在我心头的少数几位作家之一，这些作家中有的还在世，大多数已经死了。只要沉浸在门罗小说的世界里，我便能将我自己在身为人类较好的时刻里表现出的庄严可敬与宁静深沉的趣味，同一个完全虚构的人物相对照。 But suspense and purity, which are a gift to the reader, present problems for the reviewer. Basically, ''Runaway'' is so good that I don't want to talk about it here. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it. 悬疑和纯粹是作家赠给读者的礼物，但对书评者来说就成了问题。基本上，《逃离》实在太好，以至于我根本不想在这儿谈起它。引用书中的句子或是叙述故事梗概，对它来说不公平。公平的方式就是去读它。 In fulfillment of my reviewerly duties, I would like to offer, instead, this one-sentence teaser for the last story in Munro's previous collection, ''Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage'' (2001): A woman with early Alzheimer's enters a care facility, and by the time her husband is allowed to visit her, after a 30-day adjustment period, she has found a ''boyfriend'' among the other patients and shows no interest in the husband. 不过，为了尽到书评人的义务，我打算讲一下门罗上一本小说集《憎恨、友谊、求爱、恋爱、婚姻》(Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001)里的最后一个故事：一个患有早期阿兹海默症的女人进了疗养院，经过30天调整期后，丈夫获许探视，这时她已经在同院病人中找了个“男朋友”，对丈夫一点也不感兴趣了。 This is not a bad premise for a story. But what begins to make it distinctively Munrovian is that, years ago, back in the 1960's and 1970's, the husband, Grant, had affair after affair with other women. It's only now, for the first time, that the old betrayer is being betrayed. And does Grant finally come to regret those affairs? Well, no, not at all. Indeed, what he remembers from that phase of his life is ''mainly a gigantic increase in well-being.'' He never felt more alive than when he was cheating on the wife, Fiona. It tears him up, of course, to visit the facility now and to see Fiona and her ''boyfriend'' so openly tender with each other and so indifferent to him. But he's even more torn up when the boyfriend's wife removes him from the facility and takes him home. Fiona is devastated, and Grant is devastated on her behalf. 对于短篇小说而言，这不是一个糟糕的设定。但让这个故事带上鲜明门罗特色的是其他东西：多年前，在20世纪60到70年代，这个名叫格兰特的丈夫和别的女人不断发生风流韵事。到如今，这个老背叛者第一次尝到被人背叛的滋味。格兰特是否会为以前的风流事感到悔恨呢？不，一点也不。事实上，记忆中他人生的那个阶段“主要是在幸福感方面有巨大提升”，欺骗妻子菲奥娜是他人生里最为生机勃勃的时刻。当然，去疗养院，看着菲奥娜和她的“男朋友”公然卿卿我我，对他冷漠不堪，也让他感到痛苦。但更让他痛苦的是，那个男朋友的妻子办理出院手续，把他带回家。菲奥娜崩溃了，格兰特也替她心碎。 And here is the trouble with a capsule summary of a Munro story. The trouble is I want to tell you what happens next. Which is that Grant goes to see the boyfriend's wife to ask if she might take the boyfriend back to visit Fiona at the facility. And that it's here that you realize that what you thought the story was about -- all the pregnant stuff about Alzheimer's and infidelity and late-blooming love -- was actually just the setup: that the story's great scene is between Grant and the boyfriend's wife. And that the wife, in this scene, refuses to let her husband see Fiona. That her reasons are ostensibly practical but subterraneanly moral and spiteful. 要概括门罗的小说就是这样麻烦。问题就在于，我想告诉你接下来发生了什么。后来格兰特去见了那个男朋友的妻子，问她能不能带那个男朋友回疗养院探望菲奥娜。看到这儿你觉得自己应该明白这个故事讲的是什么了吧？——关于阿兹海默症的一切，不忠，以及迟来的爱情——然而这些只不过是个开始：这个故事最精彩的一幕发生在格兰特与那个男朋友的妻子之间。那个妻子拒绝让丈夫去见菲奥娜。她的理由表面上很实际，但实际上关乎道德，而且十分恶毒。 And here my attempt at capsule summary breaks down altogether, because I can't begin to suggest the greatness of the scene if you don't have a particular, vivid sense of the two characters and how they speak and think. The wife, Marian, is narrower-minded than Grant. She has a perfect, spotless suburban house that she won't be able to afford if her husband returns to the facility. This house, not romance, is what matters to her. She hasn't had the same advantages, either economic or emotional, that Grant has had, and her obvious lack of privilege occasions a passage of classic Munrovian introspection as Grant drives back to his own house. 现在我讲述故事梗概的企图已经彻底失败，因为假如你不能在心里栩栩如生地勾勒出这两个人物，乃至他们说话和思考的方式，就不能领会这一幕到底有多精彩。这个妻子名叫玛丽安，她比格兰特心胸狭窄，她拥有一栋完美的、一尘不染的郊区宅邸，如果丈夫回到疗养院，她就负担不起这栋房子的费用。在她心目中最重要的是这栋房子，才不是什么罗曼蒂克。她不具备格兰特拥有的经济与情感优势。当格兰特开车回家时，他进行了一番典型的门罗式自省，这样珍贵的时刻，玛丽安显然也不会拥有。 Their conversation had ''reminded him of conversations he'd had with people in his own family. His uncles, his relatives, probably even his mother, had thought the way Marian thought. They had believed that when other people did not think that way it was because they were kidding themselves -- they had got too airy-fairy, or stupid, on account of their easy and protected lives or their education. They had lost touch with reality. Educated people, literary people, some rich people like Grant's socialist in-laws had lost touch with reality. Due to an unmerited good fortune or an innate silliness. . . . 两人的谈话“让他想起他和自己家人的谈话。他的叔父、亲戚，或许还有他的母亲，他们和玛丽安思考的方式都是一样的。他们相信其他人不会这样想，因为那些人是在自欺欺人——那些人太爱空想或者太愚蠢，因为他们过着轻松的、受保护的生活，或者是因为受过教育。这让他们脱离现实。受过教育的人、文艺的人、还有些富裕的人，就像格兰特那些信仰社会主义的姻亲们，他们脱离了现实生活。这都是因为他们拥有他们不配得到的财富，或是因为他们天生就愚蠢……” ''What a jerk, she would be thinking now. “多蠢的人哪，她这会儿一定在这么想。” ''Being up against a person like that made him feel hopeless, exasperated, finally almost desolate. Why? Because he couldn't be sure of holding on to himself against that person? Because he was afraid that in the end they'd be right?'' “要和这样一个人打交道让他觉得又绝望又烦恼，最后几乎感到凄凉。为什么？因为他不能确定自己在这样一个人面前还能保持自我？因为他害怕到最后会发现他们其实是对的？” I end this quotation unwillingly. I want to keep quoting, and not just little bits but whole passages, because it turns out that what my capsule summary requires, at a minimum, in order to do justice to the story -- the ''things within things,'' the interplay of class and morality, of desire and fidelity, of character and fate -- is exactly what Munro herself has already written on the page. The only adequate summary of the text is the text itself. 我不情不愿地结束了这段引语。我想一直引述下去，不是像现在这样只从整段中摘几句，为了要对这个故事公平起见，我的概括中就需要引用那么多东西——“蕴含在事物之中的事物”，阶级与道德、欲望与忠诚、性格与命运之间的相互作用——这就是门罗字里行间的东西。对文本唯一准确的总结就是文本本身。 Which leaves me with the simple instruction that I began with: Read Munro! Read Munro! Except that I must tell you -- cannot not tell you, now that I've started -- that when Grant arrives home after his unsuccessful appeal to Marian, there's a message from Marian on his answering machine, inviting him to a dance at the Legion hall. 我的意见很简单，就是我开头说过的：快去读门罗！快去读门罗！不过我在这里还得告诉你——这其实是没法告诉你的，现在我还是说了——格兰特去求玛丽安，但是没成功，后来他回到家里，在电话答录机中发现玛丽安的信息，约他去社团舞厅跳舞。 Also: that Grant has already been checking out Marian's breasts and her skin and likening her, in his imagination, to a less than satisfying litchi: ''The flesh with its oddly artificial allure, its chemical taste and perfume, shallow over the extensive seed, the stone.'' 还有：格兰特其实已经在想像中触摸过玛丽安的乳房和肌肤，把她比作美味的荔枝：“那肉体有着奇异的人工魅力，那股化学的气味和香水味，覆盖在大大的、石头般的种子上。” Also: that, some hours later, while Grant is still reassessing Marian's attractions, his telephone rings again and his machine picks up: ''Grant. This is Marian. I was down in the basement putting the wash in the dryer and I heard the phone and when I got upstairs whoever it was had hung up. So I just thought I ought to say I was here. If it was you and if you are even home.'' 还有，几小时后，格兰特心里还在权衡着玛丽安的魅力，他的电话又响了，还是自动答录机接听的：“格兰特，我是玛丽安。我在地下室里，正把衣服放进甩干机，我上楼时听见电话响了，不知是谁打来的，然后又挂断了。所以我觉得如果那是你，如果你还在家里，我最好告诉你我在这儿。” And this still isn't the ending. The story is 49 pages long -- the size of a whole life, in Munro's hands -- and another turn is coming. But look how many ''things within things'' the author already has uncovered: Grant the loving husband, Grant the cheater, Grant the husband so loyal that he's willing, in effect, to pimp for his wife, Grant the despiser of proper housewives, Grant the self-doubter who grants that proper housewives may be right to despise him. It's Marian's second phone call, however, that provides the true measure of Munro's writerly character. To imagine this call, you can't be too enraged with Marian's moral strictures. Nor can you be too ashamed of Grant's laxity. You have to forgive everybody and damn no one. Otherwise you'll overlook the low probabilities, the odd chances, that crack a life wide open: the possibility, for example, that Marian in her loneliness might be attracted to a silly liberal man. 还不算完。这个短篇有49页——在门罗手中，这就是整整一生的长度——另一个转折发生了。但是看看作家已经揭露了多少“蕴含在事物之中的事物”吧：热爱妻子的格兰特，欺骗妻子的格兰特，忠诚到愿意为妻子找男友的格兰特，鄙视家庭主妇的格兰特，自我怀疑，承认家庭主妇或许有权鄙视他的格兰特。然而玛丽安的第二个电话真正带来了门罗笔下特有的人物性格。想一想这个电话，你没法为玛丽安在精神上的狭隘而愤怒，也无法鄙视格兰特的散漫。你得原谅所有人，不能去怪任何人。否则你就会忽视那微小的可能，那极少的机会，那个能令人生敞开的缝隙：比如说一个愚蠢的自由主义者爱上孤独的玛丽安的可能性。 And this is just one story. There are stories in ''Runaway'' that are even better than this one -- bolder, bloodier, deeper, broader -- and that I'll be happy to synopsize as soon as Munro's next book is published. 这只是其中一个短篇小说。《逃离》中有好几篇都比这篇要好，它们更大胆、更残酷、更深刻也更广泛。假如门罗再出下一本书，我很乐意为读者概括这本书里的内容。 Or, but, wait, one tiny glimpse into ''Runaway'': What if the person offended by Grant's liberality -- by his godlessness, his self-indulgence, his vanity, his silliness -- weren't some unhappy stranger but Grant's own child? A child whose judgment feels like the judgment of a whole culture, a whole country, that has lately taken to embracing absolutes? 不过，等一等，再来看一眼《逃离》吧：假如有人被格兰特的慷慨，他的无神主义、自我放纵、虚荣和愚蠢惹恼又该怎么办呢，这个人不是什么郁郁寡欢的陌生人，而是格兰特的亲生女儿。这个女儿的看法就像是整个文化、整个国家的看法，近来更是被全盘接受。 What if the great gift you've given your child is personal freedom, and what if the child, when she turns 21, uses this gift to turn around and say to you: your freedom makes me sick, and so do you? 假如“个人自由”是你给予子女的最好礼物，假如这个女儿一满21岁，就动用了这个礼物，转过身去对你说：“你的自由让我恶心”，那你又该怎么办呢？ 8. Hatred is entertaining. The great insight of media-age extremists. How else to explain the election of so many repellent zealots, the disintegration of political civility, the ascendancy of Fox News? First the fundamentalist bin Laden gives George Bush an enormous gift of hatred, then Bush compounds that hatred through his own fanaticism, and now one half of the country believes that Bush is crusading against the Evil One while the other half (and most of the world) believes that Bush is the Evil One. There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate. Whenever I think about politics, my pulse rate jumps as if I'm reading the last chapter of an airport thriller, as if I'm watching Game Seven of a Sox-Yankees series. It's like entertainment-as-nightmare-as-everyday-life. 其八，憎恨很有娱乐色彩。这是媒体时代极端分子的远见卓识。别人是怎样解释那么多令人厌恶的热心者的选举活动、政治客套的崩溃，以及福克斯新闻的优势地位的？先是原教旨主义者本·拉登给乔治·布什送上了一份憎恨的大礼，然后布什用自己的狂热让这份憎恨变得更加复杂。现在整个国家有一半人相信布什是在对邪恶发起圣战，另一半人（以及世界上的大多数人）相信布什就是邪恶本身。现在已经几乎没有人心里没有仇恨了，也没有什么人根本不受任何人憎恨。每当我想起政治就会脉搏加快，好像在读机场惊悚小说的最后一章，或者是看红袜队对洋基队季后赛的第七场。这就是日常生活中噩梦般的娱乐。 Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it's like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself; and, if this is difficult to imagine, then you might try spending a few evenings with the most dubious of Canadians. Who, at the end of her classic story ''The Beggar Maid,'' in which the heroine, Rose, catches sight of her ex-husband in an airport concourse, and the ex-husband makes a childish, hideous face at her, and Rose wonders ''How could anybody hate Rose so much, at the very moment when she was ready to come forward with her good will, her smiling confession of exhaustion, her air of diffident faith in civilized overtures?'' 好一点的小说能拯救这个世界吗？总会有一些微小的希望存在（奇怪的事确实时有发生），但答案几乎肯定是“不”、“不能”。不过，好的小说还是有一定机会拯救你的灵魂。假如你对内心释放的憎恨感到不快，你或许可以试着想像一下憎恨你的人内心的感受；你或许可以想想，你也有可能是邪恶本身；假如这很难以想像，那么你或许可以试着花几个晚上与门罗笔下那些最最含糊犹疑的加拿大人们相处。在她最经典的小说《乞丐少女》(The Beggar Maid)中，女主人公罗斯在机场大厅看到前夫，前夫对她露出了一个孩子气的嫌恶表情。罗斯想：“一个人怎么会如此憎恨罗斯呢？她正准备带着好意走上前去，微笑着承认自己筋疲力尽，以文明方式表达不同的信念。” She is speaking to you and to me right here, right now. 她的心声正是说给此时此刻的你我。 乔纳森·弗兰岑(Jonathan Franzen)是《纠正》(The Corrections)的作者。 |
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