The Comic Spirit in Alice Munro's Open Secrets: "A Real Life" and "The Jack Randa Hotel" - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by W. R. Martin, Warren U. Ober

When Gail secretly follows Will, her errant lover, from Canada to Australia and in an exchange of letters impersonates an older woman who has died, we enjoy her ingenuity and his twists and turns in the cat-and-mouse game--especially the "armigerous" joke (172-73)--that she teasingly plays with him. This game has the appropriateness of being a sort of extension or development of the style of the exchanges that have always been part of their relationship: Gail's "old habit" was "trying to think up clever and lighthearted things to say to Will" (162). They were constantly adopting theatrical poses and masks to amuse each other. Gail, a lively and inventive woman, "sold clothes that she made" (165); and Will, after working for the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was teaching drama in the Walley school (167). But when Sandy, a young exchange drama teacher from Australia, came to the school, she and Will fell "seriously in love," and Will unceremoniously "followed her to Australia" (168).

After Will's departure, Gail visits his mother Cleata. Her lifestyle with her son has a fascination for Gail, whose observations and thoughts about Will and his mother are given us at some length. "`This is Heaven,' Gail sometimes said, meaning not just the [tequila Cleata introduced her to] but the screened veranda and hedged back yard, the old house behind them with its shuttered windows, varnished floors, inconveniently high kitchen cupboards, and out-of-date flowered curtains.... [S]he had thought, This is how really civilized people live." There were also "the absurd things that Will and Cleata thought it natural to talk about" (164). Cleata avoids talking about difficult matters, such as Will's defection, and her conversation takes her on apparently absurd tangents and non-sequiturs. But Will's address in Australia seems to have been left out deliberately by Cleata for Gail to find, and she duly makes a copy of it (168).

Gail seems eventually to realize that mother and son, with their ceremony and absurdities, are keeping reality at arm's length, as with their "screened veranda and hedged back yard." Will's career can be seen as a retreat from the public world of the NFB and CBC to a private world at home and school. His involvement with Sandy and flight to Australia are also a sort of escape from his affair with Gail, an unwillingness to face and to come to grips with his deepest feelings and his life at a time of something like a midlife crisis: "I am 56" (172). Will's letter to "Ms. Catherine Thornaby" that Gail steals from his mailbox is another attempt to find a new connection and a new start after his relationship with Sandy has worn thin.

We see that, to some extent at least, Gail's state is similar to Will's. She has been through vicissitudes: lost a seven-week-old baby, suffered from pelvic inflammation, and had a hysterectomy. She has often been "anxious and desperate and ... spent a lot of time doing laundry and worrying about money and feeling she owed so much to any man who took up with her" (166). For her too the games and charades she engaged in with Will were an attempt to hold the past at bay. After Will has left her, however, she changes. At first she is inclined to follow the line suggested by women talking in her shop who tell tales of "betrayals" and argue that they should "give up" on men as partners. But when Gail learns that one of these women has "placed an ad in the Personal Column," she finds that her enjoyment of the policy of withdrawal has "palled rather quickly" (163). She then changes her posture and plan fundamentally, using the methods she used before--theatrical disguise and lighthearted and clever tricks--but to a very different end, not to keep the real world at a distance but to take control of her life and recover the man she realizes she loves and needs.