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

As she muses about her breakup with Will, Gail makes a significant discovery. She remembers when "she had the upper hand."

   So when did she stop having it? ... Was she a person who believed that
   somebody had to have the upper hand? (166-67)

When Gail finds herself on a plane to Australia on her way to reclaim Will, she signals to herself and to us her tacit recognition that her affair with Will has involved not only an attempt by them both to shelter themselves from the slings and arrows of life but also a contest between the two of them for control of the relationship--"to have the upper hand." Paradoxically, Gail takes control of her life when she relinquishes her attempts to regain the upper hand and follows her partner to the ends of the earth; at the same time, however, she has no doubt shed her compulsion to feel gratitude "to any man who took up with her." The story ends as Gail sends Will a message offering him the opportunity to recognize their equal status in a renewed partnership: "Now it's up to you to follow me," she writes (189). This development in their relationship is clearly in line with Meredith's notion that "pure comedy" can flourish only where equality between men and women has been "won" (Meredith 32).

If humor, irony, and satire inform "A Real Life," high comedy is the essence of "The Jack Randa Hotel," and it is comedy that skillfully accommodates a very moving story indeed. This is where the supreme Meredithian comic spirit shows how it surpasses other comic strains and becomes the epitome and measure of civilization itself; it is exalted, but also, because it touches the deepest primeval pulses of life, profound.

Gail goes back to Canada without Will, leaving him to follow of his own accord, but she sends her message to him--"a note, folded up tight"--in a little box, something made by Australian aborigines and hence produced by a culture that has prehistoric roots. This box, her present to Will, "has a pattern of yellow dots, irregularly spaced," which

   flung out in that way remind Gail of something she saw last fall. She and
   Will saw it. They went for a walk on a sunny afternoon. They walked from
   their house by the river up the wooded bank, and there they came on a
   display that they had heard about but never seen before.

   Hundreds, maybe thousands, of butterflies were hanging in the trees,
   resting before their long flight down the shore of Lake Huron and across
   Lake Erie, then on south to Mexico. They hung there like metal leaves,
   beaten gold--like flakes of gold tossed up and caught in the branches.

   "Like the shower of gold in the Bible," Gail said.

   Will told her that she was confusing Jove and Jehovah. (188-89)

Something like the same mockery appears in the name of the hotel that provides the story's title. The hotel is named for the jacaranda tree, and Gail's Canadian ear has difficulty in coping with the Aussie pronunciation of the name: she hears it as "The Jack Randa Hotel," and the reader may even recall it as something like "The Randy Jack Hotel," with overtones of bawdry and the disreputable. But the title also points to the neighboring jacaranda trees in full bloom: "The flowers are a color that [Gail] has seen and could not have imagined on trees before--a shade of silvery blue, or silvery purple, so delicate and beautiful that you would think it would shock everything into quietness, into contemplation, but apparently it has not" (180). Seeing the jacarandas in bloom amounts to a new experience for Gail and corresponds to her new awareness of her love for Will.