Alice Munro married Gerald Fremlin and began writing about him. He inspired the central man in “Labor Day Dinner”—he was the man making fun of Roberta’s body. Speaking with a reporter, Munro said, “My husband doesn’t read my stories.” And Gerald made a correction: “I read them. We just don’t talk about them.” Gerald popped up as Orpheus in “The Children Stay,” as Ladner in “Vandals,” as the murderer in “Dimension.” Although Rachel Aviv does not mention “Floating Bridge,” I think Gerald was there, too—he was the emotionally abusive partner. He was the suicide case in “Comfort.” After Gerald died, Alice asked not to be buried near him. While senile, Alice mentioned that she never “wanted that pedafil”—she seemed to invent a word somewhere between “pedophile” and “pitiful.” Rachel Aviv writes about cycles of trauma—Alice once moved far away from her own mother, and later, Andrea Skinner detached herself from Alice. Skinner once observed a vacancy in Alice’s eyes; “it w...
Critics are celebrating Matthew Rhys for his WTF fuck. It’s a great face—but all Rhys faces are great faces. Rhys in horror, yes, but also Rhys in discomfort, Rhys in frenzy, Rhys in anger. The Rhys of “Widow’s Bay” is sweaty, desperate, and needy—he is relatable. There must be a cost to exposing so much inner weakness. What a gift Rhys has. In “Widow’s Bay,” Rhys has lied to his adolescent son: “Your mother died in childbirth.” In fact, the mother lived for years, and her schizophrenic letters are waiting to be discovered. Rhys learns that he can lift a curse on “his” island—to promote tourism, he just needs to murder a certain tainted citizen. (There is an elaborate story about a poisoned bloodline.) The problem is that the citizen in question is Rhys’s octogenarian receptionist—can he really bring himself to smother her with a pillow? People have written about “Widow’s Bay” and its relationship to history. In America, we try to build industries on nostalgia—but, ...