Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Too Much Happiness is a book of sad short stories by Booker winning author Alice Munro.

The first story, Dimensions, is about a young woman who visits her husband in the psychiatric ward of a prison after he murdered their three children. She lives an almost invisible life and is looking for answers which probably don’t exist. This story set the depressing tone for the collection.

The next story, Fiction, tells of a marriage breakdown. He fell in love with another woman, she moved on. Years later she meets the now adult child of the other woman, who has written a memoir of her childhood. The woman features in the memoir but the author doesn’t recognise the woman when she lines up to have her copy of the book signed.

Wenlock Edge is sad and creepy. Two young women share a room in a boarding house while one attends university and the other seeks life experiences. One of the women is being kept by a old man who would be described as a pervert if he weren’t so rich.

My favourite story was Child’s Play. It features two girls at a summer camp whose behaviour is as unexpected as it is terrible. I can’t say more without giving the plot away, but I was shocked by the outcome.

The title story, Too Much Happiness is the longest in the collection. This story was set in the 1800s and features a Russian female mathematician who lives a bohemian life. Like all of the women in this collection she doesn’t live a fairy-tale happy life either, but she had more choices than most women of her time, partly because of her education and brains, and partly because of her personality.

I expected a happier read from this book – clearly I was led astray by the title. The writing itself was lovely but the stories were too depressing for my tastes. I’ll probably read a novel by Alice Munro sometime but will know to get in truckloads of chocolate in advance so I can endure the misery of her character’s lives.