The ‘professional person’ and ‘the world we were living in’: Making sense of (the) late Alice Munro

Alice Munro’s late work is particularly challenging, and many critics have commented on these stories’ emphasis on our uncertain, unknowable and incomprehensible relationship with those around us and the larger world we inhabit. This article examines the role of the ‘professional person’, the therapists, doctors and psychologists that frequently appear within Munro’s late stories. Specifically, these figures function as failing readers whose attempts at helping their patients exist in the world cannot account for its complexity. Rather, these figures are most helpful when they disregard the pull towards resolution. Through its focus on five late stories – ‘Night’, ‘Gravel’, ‘Too Much Happiness’, ‘In Sight of the Lake’ and ‘Dimensions’ – this article argues that the ‘professional person’ provides comfort through their presence, not through interpretation, diagnosis and understanding, which cannot illuminate the opaque mystery of this world. The essay then situates this reading within the recent revelations from Munro’s own private life, knowledge that only deepens the mystery of these stories and suggests that the figure of Munro herself has become an aporia.