The long and the short of it
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Alice Munro’s ‘Away From Her’ (Vintage: 76 pp., $9 paper) is not a new book -- not really. Rather, it’s a stand-alone edition of her 1999 short story ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain,’ retitled as a tie-in for the film that it inspired. According to a preface, director and screenwriter Sarah Polley read the story and couldn’t shake it; the resulting movie, which stars Julie Christie and Olympia Dukakis, opens May 4.
Of course, Munro’s is hardly the first short story to be repackaged and sold as a tie-in; in the last few years alone, Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ has appeared as a similar kind of mini-book, as has Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Minority Report.’ Nor is ‘Away From Her’ the only new movie to draw its inspiration from a piece of short fiction. Ray Lawrence’s ‘Jindabyne,’ which opens a week before the Polley film, recasts Raymond Carver’s exquisite ‘So Much Water So Close to Home.’
As for what this means, well, either it’s a renaissance for the short story or yet another indication that people in Hollywood can’t read at length. Regardless, it’s fascinating to see major publishers embrace a format that many smaller, independent presses have relied upon for decades; indeed, Carver’s first book of fiction was a chapbook featuring a single story, ‘Put Yourself in My Shoes,’ published by Santa Barbara’s Capra Press in 1974.
— David L. Ulin 4/17/07
