Review
"Too much happiness," murmurs Sophia Kovalevsky, joyful on her sickbed, in the title story of Alice Munro's remarkable meditation on the themes closest to her heart: hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage, to quote the title of her 2002 collection. Munro's stories always take the road less traveled to foster epiphanies in their characters and a subtle yet deep satisfaction in the reader, and "Too Much Happiness" is no different. Traveling by train through Denmark on her way to Stockholm, Sophia meets a doctor who respects her mathematical genius and, begging her not to go through plague-riddled Copenhagen, slips a tablet into her hand for consumption during the ferry ride away from that city. At this point, we have accompanied Sophia back and forth across time and place, from her early affinity for mathematics and the "white marriage" that enables her to attend college in...
Beyond the Book
Too Much Happiness=Ecstasy?
Munro's stories often contain mysterious elements that deepen their appeal, leaving the reader with something extra to savor, like a fine mint after an especially flavorful dinner. No story in the collection better exemplifies this than "Too Much Happiness," a tale brimming with sadness that nonetheless ends in ecstasy. The chemical origins of that ecstasy begin when the doctor on the train gives her a pill, saying only "'This will give you a little rest if you find the journey tedious.'" Suffering from a sore throat and nagging cough, Sophia finally takes the pill that not only lessens tedium but also makes her feel "as if her heart could go on expanding, regaining its normal condition, and continuing after that to grow lighter and fresher and...
