At Last, a Popular Nobel Winner

She had already won every other big prize, from the Booker’s newish international edition to the two big Canadian gongs, the Giller and the Governor-General’s Award. Yet it was still an unexpected delight when the Swedish Academy named Alice Munro, the “master of the contemporary short story,” as the newest laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature. With the possible exception of Mario Vargas Llosa, she is the most popular writer to get the Nobel in a decade—and I’d wrongly suspected that her achievement was too placid to get the jury’s attention. I don’t count myself at all among the embittered anti-modernists, mostly Americans, who disdain the difficult writing that the Swedes have decorated in recent years (Elfriede Jelinek, abhorred by the American literary establishment, is a favorite of mine). But there are many different ways to be modern, and Munro should be counted, no less than the spikier winners of recent years, as a modern master.