154
PARTISAN REVIEW
the past century or so had finally been taken at their word and,
ironically, had become naive.
Henry James once complained about Hawthorne's journals
that in them "his mixture of subtlety and simplicity, his interfusion of
genius with what I have ventured to call the provincial quality, is
most apparent." J ames had reasoned that Hawthorne may have
been reduced to observing the New England quotidian and Ameri–
can nature so carefully because there was "no Epsom nor
Ascot"-among other things-in the New World. Perhaps it was,
however, more a matter of temperament than circumstance that
drove Hawthorne to record as he did. Confronted with the British
Museum, he wrote: "It quite crushes a person to see so much at
once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy
heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the
frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite
Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones."
Iconoclasm and minimalism seem to yearn for the same reduction of
all variation to sameness and all history to dust. Of course, Haw–
thorne did not just keep journals, and perhaps Davis will also make
a chance discovery in the Custom House that frees her considerable
talent from regulating the merely mundane .
If
one gets the sense at times that Davis's concentration on style
produces the same distortion, the same neglect of proportion that
one sees in postmodern architecture , whose parts may be exquisite
but do not harmonize, the stories in Alice Munro's
The
Progress
of
Love
reveal a crafter perfectly at home within her medium. Set for
the most part in the rural Ontario the author has made her par–
ticular fictional landscape in previous collections, these are stories in
which the normal and the bizarre go so hand in hand that their con–
sanguinity is as obvious as that of identical twins. The more normal
people attempt again and again to take care of and take responsibil–
ity for those who are aillicted in various ways, only to find them–
selves inadequate to the task.
In "Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux," Colin has a job as a
schoolteacher, a wife and a child, while his brother Ross seems to be
a kind of village idiot who wears two hats one day while working as a
handyman for the school and is putting an engine that is too big for it
in his car. Hesitating to warn Ross of the risk, Colin extracts a
promise from his wife , Glenna, who has "a way . .. of dealing with
things without talking or thinking about them" and who isn't thrown
