You Don't Know What It Is, Do You?

A Review of Alice Munro's Nettles



The whole story seems to be another middle-age crisis story at the first glance. However, it gradually delivers a universal feeling of lost and sorrow as much as we want to grab and hold the passing wonderful times.

I'm not aging enough to identify with all complicated feelings of the protagonist. She once had and missed a childhood playmate. Her marriage doesn't go well. The bound and misunderstanding between her and her children put her in a bind of uncertainty. She's on her own and lost like a rolling stone.

And now her confusion rose when she met Mike - her old playmate - again. The recollection of old happy times stimulated her a crush on him. After so many years of separation, they felt each other unfamiliar as much as close. They just shook hands, hiding hilarity. At the same time, she wanted to touch Mike, to get closer to him, to pursue her sexual desire with him. Under an unrecognizable state, she was trying to find a direction through tracing back in the day marked with a white stone. So the great rainstorm came in time. She was protected by Mike in his arms, sharing an intimate feeling with him. They stuck to each other and to the ground but the touch was "one of restraints more than comfort". Even the kiss was "more of a ritual, a recognition of survival". They could only be as friends in memory. She was "a person he knew" before, someone that helped recall the past. Nothing new would happen between them.

Like she finally realized, "it would be the same old thing, if they ever met again". The difficulties through our lives took away our youth and vitality. So the sense of security easily decides the usual track of life while one feels lost. Mike is someone good enough for her to turn to at that circumstance. But the stinging, "more insignificant plants" harmed them during the unpredictable close touch in rainstorm, telling them to seal the "unimportant" good old days. And busy being grieved and self-condemned, Mike wouldn't bother to take a risk for an uncertain future with her.

My high school chemistry teacher has an overword: life doesn't live on excuses. Though it was absence and delayed assignment she was talking about, it's true that we can't change the pass if we don't change ourselves.

Nettle, is a kind of common wild plant as a noun, also means to irritate as a verb. Being a newly-divorced single parent, the protagonist started a different life before she was ready, or say, figure out the direction. She is but searching for settling, a shelter she could be kept in, someone she could live for. And the memorial relationship of them made her more inclined to Mike.

We all have this kind of feeling when life is on a new track. The unknown future brings us friability. I'm not being negative but we have to admit that this is the way we live. Let me end with Bob Dylan's The Ballad of a Thin Man:

You raise up your head
And you ask, is this where it is?
And somebody points to you and says
It's his
And you say, what's mine?
And somebody else says, where what is?
And you say, oh my god
Am I here all alone?

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, mister Jones?