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Hello and welcome to the Double X Book Club for Thursday, December 17th.

This is Hannah Rosen, co-editor of Double X. I'm here with my co-co-editor, Emily Bazelon, and Margaret Talbot from the New Yorker, our regular on the Gap Fest. Welcome,

everyone. Today we are going to be discussing Alice Monroe's Too Much Happiness. It's her

latest book of short stories. Alice Monroe is, of course, a great Canadian. I always want to

say American. No, she's not American. She's a great, she's beloved by Americans, but she's

actually Canadian. She's a great Canadian short story writer. She's written about a dozen short story collections and novels. And this is her latest. The stories in this collection, some of which were in the New Yorker, involve a lot of characters sort of looking back and taking stock, which you would expect from a woman who's now 78 years old, and they're fabulous stories, I think. And we are going to start with a story which I know is in the New Yorker called Winlock Edge. And Margaret, could you give us a brief description of this, of this sort of bizarre. As X-rated as you choose. exactly. It's a very weird, and as Machiko Kakatani said, Balthus-like story, the artist Balthus, because

it's about a young girl.

She's a college student, sort of one of Monroe's classic kind of characters in a way, because

she is, I think it's made clear sort of an escapee from a small town who's kind of a scholarship girl and a good student and a good girl who goes off to college, goes off to university, and becomes roommates with this kind of peculiar, very kind of almost Lolita-like kind of lushe girl named Nina, who is her roommate and who has

some kind of peculiar relationship with a much older man who lives in a mansion in town.

And we gradually find out what that relationship involves because the narrator, who I think

we decided does not have a name.

Or we couldn't find it. Or we couldn't find it anyway. We don't recall it. It's first person. Eventually takes Nina's place at the house one evening and is asked to attend dinner, a kind of formal dinner with this. With Mr. Purvis, the sort of desiccated. The pervert. Elderly exactly. Elderly, it's like a DeCensian kind of name, elderly man. And there's a kind of a brisk, blonde housekeeper who actually brings her into the house and a squitzer. I could only think of Sue Sylvester on glee.

Yeah, exactly. It would be excellent. She actually described her platinum hair. This was the first hint you got that something was going to go wrong in the house. She said, you know, it's the kind of hair that spoke of cheap prostitutes, you know, sort of denatured, sort of like brittle kind of hair. Right. Dull hair. And she's very bossy. Right. Right. Right. So she ends up having a formal dinner reading poetry to this fellow. But Starknick, she's asked to remove her clothes. He does not touch her the entire evening. And she agrees. And that becomes the nub of a kind of moral and psychological crisis for her because

she realizes later that she feels damaged and exploited because she was complicit in this,

because she agreed.

Wait, I want to jump in here.

A couple of things.

First of all, I was, you know, the narrator of this story is very much like the narrator

of a couple of stories we've talked about, like the Laurie Moore narrate. You know, that sort of Rye college girl who initially is sort of struggling in her head with kind of being a hardworking girl or a pretty girl. Remember her initial roommates are these kind of flighty pretty girls and her uncle says, you know, don't be like one of them. Sort of you have to be a hardworking girl. And it suddenly occurs to her, huh, her creepy uncle saying this, maybe you do kind of have to be a pretty girl. So she's kind of being tempted along the way to kind of do something with herself and her body and out of her head. But she sort of holds herself apart from the action, this character. She's always observing. She's not right in the middle of things. And one of the questions and tensions in this story is what happens when you actually move to the middle of things as the object of this scary older guy's attention. Although her presivity remained. I mean, that's one thing that I love about the story. And many of these stories are people, are about people, things happen to them.

You know, the sort of balance between passivity and action, like she says,

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