The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro

I think of being an old maid, in another generation. There were plenty of old maids in my family. I came of straitened people, madly secretive, tenacious, economical. Like them, I could make a little go a long way. A piece of Chinese silk, folded in a drawer, worn by the touch of fingers in the dark. Or the one letter, hidden under maidenly garments, never needing to be opened or read because every word is known by heart, and a touch communicates the whole. Perhaps nothing so tangible, nothing but the memory of an ambiguous word, an intimate, casual tone of voice, a hard, helpless look. That could do. With no more than that I could manage, year after year as I scoured the milk pails, spit on the iron, followed the cows along the rough path among the alder and the black-eyed Susans, spread the clean wet overalls to dry on the fence, and the tea towels on the bushes.

Something feels missing from the first few stories in Alice Munro's collection The Moons of Jupiter. In "Dulse," a jilted woman on a holiday in Nova Scotia meets several men: a stately old man researching Willa Cather, a middle-aged fisherman, his young apprentice. We wait to see which of these men will become her lover, but none ever does--only in the quiet of her room at night does she think on what it might have been like to be with one of them.Other stories are composed of absences like these, absences that do not quite inspire the mind to fill them: In the marvelous second section of "Chaddeleys and Flemings," titled "The Stone in the Field," the narrator seeks out a large flat stone on the land where her father once lived, a stone which served as the marker of the grave of an old hermit who lived and died among her aunts. "If I had been younger," she says, "I would have figured out a story. I would have insisted on Mr. Black's being in love with one of my aunts, and on one of them--not necessarily the one he was in love with--being in love with him."

But the stone is gone, carted away for planting, and the story never gets written by the older and wiser narrator, who knows that little can be gained or revealed by making them. In the charming "Turkey Season," a younger--and less wise--narrator speculates on the relationship between her enigmatic coworker Herb and the rude but beautiful young man he has hired. "Later still," she writes, "I backed off from this explanation. I got to a stage of backing off from the things I couldn't really know." I got the sense of a writer frustrated with the entire hoopla of making things up about people who have never existed, as though Munro, a decade into her occupation as a writer of short fiction, was already banging against certain assumptions she would later find ways to circumvent, or explode.

All of which made it such a surprise to get to "Accident," a story in which, in the sometimes-style of Ms. Munro, horrible and bloody things occur. Here, it's the death of a young boy, crushed beneath an automobile on his sled. The news is broken to the father, a school teacher, from the other side of a door to a closet where is in the middle of a sexual liaison with a coworker, one who is not his wife. The accident sets off a chain of events that eventually leads to him leaving his wife and marrying the coworker, and to one of those very Munro time jumps, where the new wife returns to her old town to reflect on just how she arrived at the life she is leading. Meeting the man who was driving the fateful car, she thinks:

If he had not gone out in the snow that day to take a baby carriage across town, Frances would not live in Ottawa now, she would not have her two children, she would not have her life, the same life. That is true. She is sure of it, but it is too ugly to think about. The angle from which she has to see that can never be admitted to; it would seem monstrous.

And yet is she herself any different?: "She's had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she's ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it. Not altogether the same, surely. The same." What is so wonderful about this moment, I think, is that the observation itself is so commonplace. Who hasn't looked back on some small moment, some blot of chance, and thought, if not for that, everything would be different? But what Munro does so well is capture the great shock of the observation, and the frightful disorienting wonder that our lives, and thus ourselves, may be only the productions of happenstance. And while "Accident" stands out amid a collection of stories where few things "happen," I wonder if it doesn't come to the same place, bumping up against that hard wall of imagination.

There's an honesty to that, to the observation that we live so much of our lives in our minds and that, in spite of that, the life we live in our minds is so weightless. Honest is a word that I associate with Munro's writing; you hardly ever feel as if the characters have been pulled in one direction or another to make a point against their will, as I think you often do even in very good short fiction. In "Dulse," Lydia doesn't sleep with the Cather fan or the fisherman because she wouldn't; the fleeting and imaginary life in which she does has to suffice for her and us both. And yet, even as I say this, I remember a story like "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd," about two old friends who end up in the same nursing home, fighting over the affection of new friends, only to return to each other in the end--what might be another writer's most perfectly crafted story feels, for Munro, a little too stagey.

My feeling was that The Moons of Jupiter isn't among Munro's best, that it seems like a relic of a transitional period in which she was rethinking the methods that make The Lives of Girls and Women and Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You so engaging. It ends terrifically, with the title story, which is a surprise sequel of sorts to the first: the woman who once scoured her father's farm for a headstone to tell her something of her distant, unknowable family, finds herself a mother, distant from and unknown from her daughters, and her father in the hospital facing what may be his death. She goes to the planetarium, she discusses the Galilean moons of Jupiter with her father in his hospital bed. It's such a silly conversation, not at all equal to the gravity of the moment, but what could be? It's enough. She goes outside and imagines that her estranged daughter might be there in the Toronto crowd. She's not, of course; Munro would never. But the imagining, that too is enough.