The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Such frights will come and go.

Then there'll be one that won't. One that won't go.

But for now, the corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects. Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.

And Alice wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. In "What Do You Want to Know For?," the narrator--here, clearly a stand-in for Munro herself--undergoes a mammogram that reveals a lump in her breast. She prepares for the biopsy, and perhaps worse, but it's postponed twice, until the doctor responsible tells her that the lump has always been there, on every mammogram she's received, and it hasn't grown or changed. It's not worth cutting out. Routine accretes again around her life, which was briefly opened up into frightening possibilities, but as she writes, one day there will be a fright that doesn't go away. They're sobering words, one year after Munro's death, after the fright that did not go. And of course they are made more complicated by the revelation of Munro's complicity with the ongoing sexual abuse of her daughter. but not, I think, invalidated. Munro seems to have lied for a long time about her life, but in her stories, what she wrote had a way of being deeply true. So it's with a mix of sadness and relief that I can say there are no more Alice Munro stories left for me to read.

The View from Castle Rock may be Munro's most personal collection, even moreso than the autobiographical "Finale" that closes out Dear Life. The long first section, titled "No Advantages," is a history of Munro's Scottish family, which emigrated to Canada and the United States after the Highland Clearances in the 18th century. The title image of the book comes from one of those ancestors, who, as a little kid, was taken up a prominent hill in Edinburgh and jokingly told by his father that the body of water across the bay--really, Firth--was America. It must have seemed so close, so full of promise and threat, and it must have felt a little like fate, too, because that ancestor did become an emigrant, to the real America. These stories are fascinating and rich, although I had trouble keeping the different Williams and Andrews apart, and drawn from life as they are, they resist a kind of completeness that Munro's stories do, I think, typically possess. They are more ragged, diffuse. I loved the moment when a young boy, walking from Canada to the United States, sneaks his baby sister away from his mother and hides her in a shed, then blames the disappearance on an Indian servant they left back in Canada. (Suspicions of Indian magic make this a persuasive accusation.) The little girl is found, and the boy is never blamed, and so there is no hammer fall of the kind that Munro usually doesn't shy away from. Instead, the moment is another thread in a tapestry of immigrant life, the fabric from which the writer herself is woven.

From there, the stories move down the generations. Familiar images come back again. There's Munro's father, with his silver fox farm. There's her mother, who falls prey to a debilitating disease. We've heard these stories before, in The Lives of Girls and Women and elsewhere. But Munro had such a knack for making the same story seem new each time. She changes the name of the Ontario town--here, it's Blyth--and somehow, that's all it takes, for the story to be revived and refreshed. And of course, we get aspects of these lives we've never seen before, like the introduction of her father's new wife, a foolish and insensitive woman with the improbably name of Irlma. To what extent do the old stories develop and explain the new? Is it about historical contingency only, the obvious fact that, had these people not emigrated to Canada, there would be no Alice Munro? Or is it something else, about the way the old Laidlaws (Munro's maiden name) carved out a new home for themselves so far from Scotland, something we must always do for ourselves, no matter how far from our parents' doorstep we get? There is no permanence, of course. The lump in the breast reminds us of that. We fashion home for ourselves out of what's at hand, and even then, it's only for a little while.

I'll really miss reading a Munro story for the first time. At this moment, it's a hard thing to talk about her writing as writing. It might be nice to take a break from her for a year or two. But I can't imagine never returning to these stories again, and I do plan to come back to them someday. They'll be tinged with a double sadness--dismay or disgust on top of the lack of newness--but they are too much of home for me, too, to be left totally behind.

Open Secrets by Alice Munro

Maureen is a young woman yet, though she doesn't think so, and she has life ahead of her. First a death--that will come soon--then another marriage, new places and houses. In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she'll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking at an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.

The final story in Alice Munro's collection, Open Secrets, is called "Vandals." As with so many of Munro's stories, it has several layers, so that it's difficult to tell--or tell at first--where the center lies. One layer is Bea, a woman who leaves her staid boyfriend for Ladner, a gruff taxidermist who keeps a maintains a kind of self-made nature trail on his rustic property. Another layer is Liza, who lived across the street from Ladner and Bea as a young girl, and who now, as Ladner is in the hospital dying, is asked to watch after their house. With her husband in tow, she enters the house and proceeds to smash everything in it. We must read between the lines to make sense of this shocking act, and the truth is only glancingly suggested--that Ladner sexually abused Liza and her brother when they were children. Here--content warning--is our only clue:

When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose form its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look at him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.

To say the least, I was floored by this story. I expected some of the stories in Open Secrets to mirror in uncomfortable ways the recent revelation that Munro stuck by her own husband for years after he sexually abused her daughter. But I didn't expect to read a story that so perfectly mirrored it that it left me with the discomforting feeling that it must have been drawn, with horrible clarity, from Munro's own life. 

For me, nothing more really needs to be said about Munro the person beyond what Brandon Taylor wrote in his thoughtful substack post about Andrea Skinner and her abuser, Gerald Fremkin. "People can justify anything to themselves," Taylor wrote. "Is that so interesting?" The story is a horrible one, and it is primarily horrible because of what happened to Andrea Skinner; what it has done to Alice Munro's reputation, or our image of her, is so comparatively unimportant it almost feels like an insult to focus on it. But contrary to what other people have said, I don't find it very surprising. Why should it be surprising to me? I never met Alice Munro the person; what do I know about what she is capable of? Actually, I think that those who say it is surprising because Munro writes so eloquently about abuse and our capacities for repression have it exactly backward. Who better to write about particular failures and flaws than someone who shares them? To put it another way, is there any reason in expecting an author to be better than the characters they write about?

"Vandals" begins with a letter. (Open Secrets is unique among Munro's collections for how many letters there are, I think: "Carried Away" focuses on a series of letters between a librarian and her secret admirer; in "The Jack Randa Hotel," a jilted wife secretly follows her husband to Australia and writes letters to him under an assumed name; "A Wilderness Station," about a murdered frontiersman and his suspect wife, is entirely epistolary.) This letter is from Bea to Liza, and it describes a strange dream: Bea is at a Canadian Tire (think lumberjack Sears) where buckets of bones have been laid out for purchase; she takes what she thinks are Ladner's bones, but which are too light. They prove to be the bones of a young girl, or boy, or both. This, we suspect, is the subconscious admitting to Bea that she knew exactly what was going on with Ladner, and did nothing to stop it. The conscious Bea admits it, too, buried deep in the exculpatory language of dreams. This is the most, we sense, that we will ever get from her. In retrospect, it is chilling to think of "Vandals" as a story that functions in the same way that Bea's letter does within it. Munro's knowledge, and guilt, are buried here, jumbled up but in plain sight--an open secret.

"Vandals" is, for better and worse, the best story in the collection. I also really enjoyed "The Jack Randa Hotel"; the letters the wife writes, pretending to be a recently deceased Australian to whom her husband has reached out, thinking they may be related--Munro was always one to write a plot that's hard to stuff into a sentence--are very funny in their playful cruelty. Of another tone and spirit entirely is "The Albanian Virgin," a fascinatingly un-Munro-like story about a woman who is trapped in a rustic Albanian village after a horse accident and nearly sold into marriage with a Muslim traveler. The woman saves herself by becoming a "virgin," a woman who refuses marriage and lives as a man. OK, I said it was not Munro-like, but that's a very Munrovian image, isn't it? It's just one of several images in the collection of women who escape the trap of bourgeois life by "going wild" in some way. Such a list would also include the frontier wife of "A Wilderness Station," as well, I think, as the strange young neighbor of "Spaceships Have Landed" who disappears from her home and comes back telling people that she's been abducted. 

In a way, that's the message of a lot of Munro's stories. You can play along, or you can get out. Both are a kind of madness, but you get to choose your flavor of madness. You can go up with the spaceships, maybe, or shave your head and eat at the men's table. Or you can tell yourself and others the kind of self-soothing lies that keep the monstrosity of domestic life going. You can judge for yourself which way Munro herself chose.

Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro

Trouble began, perhaps, as soon as they said that they loved each other. Why did they do that--defining, inflating, obscuring whatever it was they did feel? It seemed to be demanded, that was all--just the way changes, variations, elaborations in the lovemaking itself might be demanded. It was a way of going further. So they said it, and that night Georgia couldn't sleep. She did not regret what had been said or think that it was a lie, though she knew it was absurd. She thought of the way Miles sought to have her look into his eyes during lovemaking--something Ben expressly did not do--and she thought of how his eyes, at first bright and challenging, became cloudy and calm and sombre. That way she trusted him--it was the only way. She thought of being launched out on a gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea. Love.

In "Oranges and Apples," a story in Alice Munro's collection Friend of My Youth, a man named Murray comes home to see his wife suntanning by the pool, and Victor, his friend who has been staying in the pool house after a rough split with his wife, watching her through binoculars. Something in her body language makes Murray certain Barbara is aware of Victor, even arranging herself for him to sea. Murray spins this moment into a rage-inducing fantasy of betrayal, even going so far as to arrange for Victor and Barbara to be alone together, as if to confirm his own nightmare by forcing it to become true. In "Goodness and Mercy," young Averill listens to the captain of a passenger ship tell a story of an elderly woman who once died on board, and whom he buried at sea. Averill becomes convinced he is talking about her; after all, she is on board with her elderly and terminal mother, both of whom suspect she may expire before journey's end. Somehow, without even uttering a word, Averill comes to believe she is collaborating with the captain in a fantasy in which, her mother having been discarded, she is free to be seduced by him.

Friend of My Youth is probably the most subdued of all the collections of Munro's I've ever read. Some disasters remain--a drowning, a boy blinded by a rake, and any number of tawdry affairs--but they are somehow less real than the things that do not happen; the lives that people live in their own head, simply because the ones they really do lead are too narrow, or because everyone really wishes they could lead more than a single life at a time. This is the impulse that leads to the cuckold fantasy of "Oranges and Apples," and the dead-mom-sex-with-the-boat-captain fantasy of "Goodness and Mercy." "Differently" is another version of "Oranges and Apples" in which Georgia abandons her closest friend because of a notion--not even a belief or a conviction, it doesn't even quite get that far; it doesn't need to--that she has bedded Georgia's lover. In "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," a woman travels at last to the small town in Scotland where her now-dead husband spent the happy years of his deployment, only to discover that no one remembers him and he probably invented the relationships he had with every one of them.

Perhaps it's this impulse that leads Munro's characters, especially women, to pursue affairs with men they know are unattractive, and don't really like.  Perhaps this impulse leads to the many lies that are told. In one of my favorites in the collection, "Pictures of the Ice," an elderly minister goes around showing his parishioners a photo of the woman in Hawaii he plans on marrying, and describing the life he'll live out there in retirement. Meanwhile, his true intentions are to take a position exactly like the one he has now, in an even more frigid and remote part of Ontario. Or maybe he's the inverse of all the others: the man who loves his single life so much he wants to live a version of it forever, and must pretend to have dreams for the sake of others.

Fantasies, lies, telling stories. Many of the stories are really about telling stories. The narrator of the title story hears second-hand, from her mother, a story about a woman who gives up her fiancé when he impregnates her own sister. In the mother's version, the woman is saintly, self-sacrificial; but the narrator wants to write the version wherein the woman is proud and controlling, all too happy to have her sister and former lover under her roof to arrange their lives according to a logic of guilt and shame: "a Presbyterian witch." Of course, we never are to know who the "real" Flora was; such questions are barely worth mentioning. What the story is really about is the writing of the story--though it is also about her mother, and about mothers. In "Meneseteung," an unnamed narrator tells the story of an underappreciated Ontario writer who lived a life of spinsterhood; though the details are drawn from the writer's journals, we are keenly aware that the gaps are filled with supposition and invention. There's no other way. Even stories that don't seem to be about stories are: Georgia of "Differently" is told by a creative writing instructor, in a nice Munrovian touch, that her stories contain "Too many things": "The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out."

Sometimes Munro's stories are set in Vancouver or Victoria or Toronto, but they're most often set in small-town Ontario, and those that are always feel as if they are set in the very same place. Maybe they are. In Lives of Girls and Women, the town is called Jubilee; in Friend of My Youth, it's Walley. One of the secondary themes of all the stories is that way that Walley has changed, the way that towns change, and the way the 1950's housewife world has passed into something different--and not necessarily better. People return to Walley and see its changes, as they make note of the changes in their old friends, and in themselves. I think you have to squint a little, dig a little deeper, to find the richness and drama in Friend of My Youth, like you do with a town like Walley. When I think back on Munro's stories, I don't know that any of the ones from this collection will be on the forefront of my mind. Small towns are like that, too: sometimes they blend together, and sometimes you forget them altogether. But they are still out there, full of life and living.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

All his life--he had difficulty saying this, as he admitted, being always too wary of too much enthusiasm--all his life he had been waiting for such a student to come into this room. A student who would challenge him completely, who was not only capable of following the strivings of his own mind but perhaps of flying beyond them. He had to be careful about saying what he really believed--that there must be something like intuition in a first-rate mathematician's mind, some lightning flare to uncover what has been there all along. Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet.

When he finally brought himself to say all this to Sophia, he also said that there were those who would bridle at the very word, "poet," in connection with mathematical science. And others, he said, who would leap at the notion all too readily, to defend a muddle and laxity in their own thinking.

With all respect to Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro is the best to ever do it. She gets called "our Chekhov"--the Chekhov of the English language--with some regularity, but I don't think even Chekhov, as much a playwright as a short story writer, even approached the short story with the ferocity and genius that Alice Munro does. It's a gift, I think, to be living in the era of Alice, even if she has given up the writing of stories in her old age.

But all of that makes the title story of the collection Too Much Happiness, the most self-consciously Chekhovian thing Munro has ever written, all the more interesting. "Too Much Happiness" is the real-life story of Sophia Kovalevsky, the Russian mathematician who was, before Marie Curie, perhaps the best known female scientist in Europe. It's story that's strange for Munro in several ways: first, because it's a fictionalized rendition of a true story, second, because it's set in the nineteenth century, and third, because it's set in Europe, rather than Canada. And yet Kovalevsky's story resounds with the themes that Munro takes up all the time: the dignity of common lives, the transformative power of illness, the persistent oppression and marginalization of women.

Sophia is a brilliant mathematician who soon overtakes her own tutor, the German Weierstrass, and the story opens as she receives Europe's most prestigious mathematics prize, but she still requires the string-pulling of her male benefactors to get a job offer, and even then only in frigid Sweden, which she hates. Sophia's life has touched upon great things: her brother-in-law was a leader of the Paris Commune, and her sister gave her life to be attached to his kind of adventuresome bravado. And yet Sophia herself finds herself drawn not to a man like Jaclard but the spinster sisters of her tutor Weierstrass, who toil, not unhappily, to make the home in which his great work is done. She seesaws between the feverishness of her mathematical work and a deep satisfaction in a life of domestic and social pleasures; in the present of the story she is anticipating a happy marriage to another clever and larger-than-life Russian. "She was learning," Munro writes, "quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood--that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It  could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone." Yet neither Weierstrass, nor Jaclard, nor her fiance Maksim, nor her friend the mathematician Poincare, seem to think of such lives as opposed to one another.

The other stories are more standard Munrovian fare, and a few of them are among her best work. Especially powerful are those which are concerned with shocking violence, which, despite the domestic surface of Munro's stories, is something that lurks not far below the surface. In "Free Radicals," a sickly widow is briefly trapped in her home by a stranger who confesses that he has just murdered his family, including his mentally disabled sister, who he considered a drain on his own independence. This story finds frightening echoes in "Child's Play," one of the darkest stories Munro has ever written, about (spoiler alert) a woman who, as a child, and with an accomplice she has only recently met at summer camp, drowns another mentally disabled child. This act of momentary compulsion has transformed the life of the narrator, who has become an academic studying cultural ideas about mental disability, but who seems unable to deal with her own deed in any direct way. As disturbing as "Free Radicals" is, it's "Child's Play" that takes the darker route, as if putting us in the viewpoint not of the trapped widow but the killer. Once inside that head we are shocked to find no sadist, but only a very normal person, driven to a horrible act by the most recognizable of feelings: disgust, shame, and a need to be liked.

The story I think will stick with me most, though, is the opener "Dimensions," about a woman whose husband kills their three children. The husband, remanded by the court to a mental hospital, writes to the narrator, explaining that he has seen their children in another dimension, a place where they still exist, and the narrator, despite herself, finds this to be comforting. The rambling and esoteric voice of the letters the husband writes to the narrator have a kind of voice you might never know Munro was capable of writing, and captures something true about our willingness to step outside the bounds of logic and reasoning--with no contempt for those who must--in order to face the most difficult truths in life. And though there's no real violence to it, I loved the undercurrent of masculine viciousness in "Wenlock Edge," about a college student whose roommate convinces her to have dinner with her--I don't know what to call it but a sugar daddy--who instructs her to take off her clothes. Though she complies out of compulsive fascination, the narrator expects to be assaulted, only to be given a pleasant meal and a conversation about Greek philosophy.

Even one of the weaker stories, "Deep-Holes," provides a key to understanding Munro's stories: while hiking with his family, a boy falls into a deep glaciated hole and breaks both his legs. He grows up to be a kind of sour hippie who cuts ties with his mother, except when he wants money for his commune, and we are left to wonder whether this has something to do with the experience of falling into the hole as a child. Munro would never be so crude as to suggest that there's a causal line between the two--more likely they are both representations of the character's contemptuousness for boundaries and carefulness--but the image of the deep hole, lurking under the brush of life, ready to swallow you and break your bones, is one that rings true.

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.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Young husbands were stern, in those days.  Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies.  Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving.  Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies.  What a lot they had to learn, and so quickly.  How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.  How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century.  It was the women, then, who could slip back--during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children--into a kind of second adolescence.  A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed.  Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn't there.

The first and title story of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, a collection for which, no matter how hard you try, you'll never remember how the title words are ordered, is uncharacteristically optimistic.  I don't mean to say that Munro's stories are bleak or sad, but they are honest about the realities of fortune; adulterers and new spouses take big gambles on happiness, which pay off incompletely, if at all, but the chance of illness and disease are surer bets.  "Hateship" is a story in which fortune works out with almost comic grace: a pair of young girls play a cruel trick on their housekeeper, writing letters as if they are a distant acquaintance, claiming to be head over heels in love with her.  When the housekeeper throws caution to the wind, quits her job, and climbs upon a train to Saskatchewan with an entire trousseau packed away in the next car, we expect disaster.  But when she arrives she finds her "beau" catastrophically ill with fever, and once she's nursed him back to health, he's wise enough not to question why or how she arrived.

It's a charming story, and intriguingly structured: Munro follows one point-of-view character at a time, "handing off" the story to the next when they are encountered in the narrative, from the trainyard clerk to the housekeeper to the girls to their father, and so on.  It's a method that seems cribbed from film, which is funny, because few short story writers seem as cinematic as Munro.  The other stories have few surprises--beyond the surprises of life that Munro relishes, I mean--and for the first time I felt a dim sense that these stories were deeply familiar.  Something of the freshness of Munro has worn away for me, replaced by a very different sensation, that of settling into something friendly and familiar--an old worn armchair feeling.

Many of her usual themes are evident here.  There are fewer bad men than usual, but there is Mr. Vorguilla in "Queenie," a demanding and cruel old widower who whisks the narrator's young half sister away to Toronto in a misbegotten marriage.  Adultery is all over the place, from the imagined ("Post and Beam") to the brief and epiphany-like ("Floating Bridge," "What is Remembered," "Nettles") to sustained and life-altering ("Queenie," "Comfort," "The Bear Came Over the Mountain").  There's lots of illness and death: in "Comfort," Munro invents a hardcore atheist schoolteacher, Lewis, who is dying of ALS.  He's a prig and a boor, but his values are sincere and deeply held, not unlike Del's mother in The Lives of Girls and Women, and his wife struggles with how to honor her husband's skepticism at the end of his life, when the idea of his immortal soul would be of great comfort.  In "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," maybe the collection's best story and one of Munro's most anthologized works, Grant places his wife of fifty years, Fiona, in a nursing home because she is suffering from Alzheimer's.  When he visits, she seems only to dimly remember him, and yet he has to watch as she forms an intense bond, even a love, for another patient.

Another story, "Family Furnishings," tells of an eccentric old aunt, estranged from the narrator, who learns only late in life that her aunt was deeply offended by the way the narrator seized on a stray remark of hers and used it in her fiction.  Like "Material," one of my favorite stories of Munro's, it deals with the ethical question of using real life people in our writing: real life, of course, being the only resource we have, and yet even though the aunt's words have been totally recontextualized, something essential has been betrayed.  More than any of the stories here, I wondered if "Family Furnishings" was drawn from an experience in Munro's own life.  Is it permissible to use other people in our stories?  We already do, Munro answers, all the time, in the kind of narratives we construct around our lives, which always serve ourselves more than those who are supporting characters; in our memory we tell stories that real people--like Fiona, for example--will always betray.  That's a sure bet as anything.  But like in the title story, sometimes the stories we tell have a way of coming true.

The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro

Could a person make up something so detailed and diabolical?  The answer is yes.  A sick person's mind, a dying person's mind, could fill up with all kinds of trash and organize that trash in a most convincing way.  Enid's own mind, when she was asleep in this room, had filled up with the most disgusting inventions, with filth.  Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person's mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.  You can never say, Nobody could make that up.  Look how elaborate dreams are, layer over layer in them, so that the part you can remember and put into words is just the bit you can scratch off the top.

The first and title story of Alice Munro's collection The Love of a Good Woman is one of her real masterpieces.  At eighty pages, it's much longer than her stories usually are, but it's really a three-part story, the kind of work you can imagine beginning as an idea for a novel (as Munro says her stories often begin).  In the first part, three boys come across a car at the bottom of a river, where the driver, a local optometrist, is drowned.  Munro painstakingly explores why each of the boys, with their unique and specific home lives, wait so long to tell anyone about what they've seen.  The second part is an account of a home nurse, Enid, who is taking care of a young and dying woman who intends on spreading her disgust and rage around as widely as possible at the end of her short life.  Close to her death, this hateful woman confesses to Enid that she knows the secret about what really happened to the optometrist, Dr. Willens, a confession that sparks the third part, in which Enid, saddled with this new knowledge, must decide what she should do with it.  Confront the newly revealed murderer?  Or let dogs, sleeping now for decades, lie?

The story of the three boys may seem, at the end of the story, like a strange distraction from the story that resolves.  We never see them again; they drop out of the narrative.  But Enid slowly comes to consider that her patient's confession might have been a lie, a last-minute burst of pure diabolical venom meant to spread chaos after death.  Munro, despite how some might perceive her, is no stranger to the deepest human darknesses; I think few other authors would have the courage to imagine a character whose deathbed provides so little in the way of reconciliation or resolution or redemption.  But the experience of the boys who discover Dr. Willens' car is the only firsthand experience that is available.  Because Enid can never be sure whether the story she receives is a lie or not, only the boys' story allows us to approach anything near to truth.  Enid must resign herself to dealing only in possibility, though each possibility is only a different kind of evil.

The Love of a Good Woman is deeply interested in sickness, age, medicine, the body.  There's the aging old Mr. Gorrie of "Cortes Island," who keeps his part-time babysitter at arm's length until he brings down an old scrapbook that implies he and his wife may have engineered a murderous arson years ago.  (The parallels between this and "The Love of a Good Woman," neither of which is interested in providing the "real story," are rather obvious, I think.)  In "My Mother's Dream," it's the death of an infant that unleashes the most horrible and hidden emotions in several women.  (This story has the funny wrinkle of being written from the point-of-view of the infant, who in fact, did not die as was believed, and now is all grown up.)  In "Before the Change," a story that feels sickeningly current, a woman realizes for the first time in her life that her father has been secretly providing abortions for decades.  She opens up to him the story of her own child, long a secret, a child she's given away, but she doesn't notice that during her confession he has a debilitating stroke.  Alice Munro is not interested in giving anyone closure.

And that's one of the most interesting things about her work, I think.  Her stories often stretch across decades; they have prologues and codas that might as well have THIRTY YEARS EARLIER or THIRTY YEARS LATER written in bold across them.  It's the kind of move you expect from authors who crave closure, who feel as if they must provide it, and yet, when Munro does it, it only complicates things.  Trauma is not something that can be solved, though it can be transformed, accommodated, even ignored.  In "The Children Stay," she gives a convincing portrait of a woman who chucks a comfortable life away to pursue an impulsive love affair, and who is tormented by the thought of leaving her kids, but not tormented enough not to do it:

This is acute pain.  It will become chronic.  Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.  It may also meant hat you won't die of it.  You won't get free of it, but you won't die of it.  You won't feel it every minute, but you won't spend many days without it.  And you'll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying everything you incurred this pain to get.

I don't think it's a coincidence, in this collection, that Munro returns to the language of disease--"chronic" and "acute" pain.  She continually blurs the lines between physical and emotional pain.  She brings this habit to an extreme in "Save the Reaper," in which a young girl, grieving the impending dissolution of a love triangle her mother has got caught up in, for reasons neither she nor Munro can fully articulate, dons her mother's wedding dress and then accidentally drags the train through a lit candle.  The physical effects are permanent, though not life-ending.  The symbolism is forever.

The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro

She could not turn Patrick down.  She could not do it.  It was not the amount of money but the amount of love he offered that she could not ignore; she believed that she felt sorry for him, that she had to help him out.  It was as if he had come up to her in a crowd carrying a large, simple, dazzling object--a huge egg, maybe, of solid silver, something of doubtful use and punishing weight--and was offering it to her, in fact thrusting it at her, begging her to take some of the weight of it off him.  If she thrust it back, how could he bear it?  But that explanation left something out.  It left out her own appetite, which was not for wealth but for worship.  The size, the weight, the shine, of what he said was love (and she did not doubt him) had to impress her, even though she had never asked for it.  It did not seem likely such an offering would come her way again.

Rose grows up, like all of Alice Munro's characters, in a little town in Ontario, this one called Hanratty.  It's not far from Toronto, but it sure feels far, and the first trip to Toronto is always a moment of mysterious ritual, a moment in which one's life changes for good.  It's a testament, I think, to Munro how similar Rose is to someone like Del Jordan from Lives of Girls and Women, but still so real and alive.  Nothing in her seems like a pale imitation.

The distinguishing mark given to Rose is her poverty.  Not that Del isn't poor, or essentially working class, but this collection of stories revolves around Rose's childhood poverty like an orbiting planet.  Poverty's at the heart of the stories that her stepmother Flo peddles about hard-luck locals: vigilante mobs, cruelly treated dwarves, incestuous siblings.  Reflecting on her stepmother, Rose maintains that poverty is the source of not just horror but also pride: "It meant having those ugly tube lights and being proud of them.  It meant continual talk of money and malicious talk about new things people had bought and whether they were paid for.  It meant pride and jealousy flaring over something the new pair of plastic curtains, imitating lace, that Flo had bought for the front window."

Rose ends up at school in Toronto, where she meets Patrick, the wealthy heir to a set of BC department stores.  Their love is no Romeo and Juliet story; it's an unflinching portrait of people whose capacity to understand each other is so limited as to doom their marriage from the very beginning.  Patrick romanticizes Rose's poverty, likening her to the Beggar Maid in a painting: "She studied the Beggar Maid, meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet.  The milky surrender of her, the helplessness and gratitude.  Was that how Patrick saw Rose?  Was that how she cold be?"  The novel, or collection of stories, follows Rose through her tumultuous marriage and out the other side, after which she becomes a lonely and single actress and television presenter.  (So much of the latter stage of Rose's life seems like an alternate version of Juliet from the three-story cycle in Runaway.)  I particularly liked this observation about Patrick and Rose's daughter of Anna, a canny insight into the life of children of divorce:

Yet for Anna this bloody fabric her parents had made, of mistakes and mismatches, that anybody could see ought to be torn up and thrown away, was still the true web of life, of father and mother, of beginning and shelter.  What fraud, thought Rose, what fraud for everybody.  We come from unions which don't have in them anything like what we think we deserve.

Eventually, the story returns to Hanratty and Flo.  Of course, Rose's experience outside the world of Hanratty means she can never really go home again.  It's left her behind as much as she has.  Life in Hanratty has been pretty bitter for those who stayed, but it hasn't been a cakewalk for Rose, either.  Flo ends up in a home.  I loved this passage especially, about a blind old woman whose only way of interacting with the world is spelling words that she's given by a nurse:

There she was sitting waiting; waiting, in the middle of her sightless eventless day, till up from somewhere popped another word.  She would encompass it, bend all her energy to master it.  Rose wondered what the words were like, when she held them in her mind.  Did they carry their usual meaning, or any meaning at all?  Were they like words in dreams or in the minds of young children, each one marvelous and distinct and alive as a new animal?  This one limp and clear, like a jellyfish, that one hard and mean and secretive, like a horned snail.  They could be austere and comical as top hats, or smooth and lively and flattering as ribbons.  A parade of private visitors, not over yet.

Too good.  Like this woman, like Flo maybe, stricken with dementia, there is a great and painful loss in losing the knowledge and experience of your youth.  But maybe there's an opening, too, to see life as a child again, to remake and remold oneself.  Or at least, to believe that such a thing is possible.

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro

And I thought, all these things don't seem much like life, when you're doing them, they're just what you do, how you feel up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you'll find yourself, then you'll find yourself, in life.  It's not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you're comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it.  Then you're dying, Mother is dying, and it's just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you've had is all there is, and going to a Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes now seems worth wanting, O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.

Brent, where was it we read some internet commenter using Alice Munro as a stand-in for a kind of fiction they could not stand, the kind of blanched realism you might see in The New Yorker?  It was a comment from someone who didn't understand, perhaps even had never read, Munro.  Surely it was a man.  If such things are worth responding to, one might steer him toward this collection, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, which opened my eyes to just how modernist and metafictional Munro can be.  These stories are all about the way that we tell stories, and how we do so even in moments where we're not sure we're telling stories at all.  The elderly man who is the protagonist of "Walking on Water" considers his dreams about his mother and siblings, all dead:

This dream always left some weight on his mind.  He supposed it was because he was still carrying around, for part of the day, the presences of dead people, father and mother, brother and sister, whose faces he could not clearly remember when he was awake.  How to convey the solidity, the complexity, reality, of those presences--even if he had anybody to convey them to?  It almost seemed to him there must be a place where they moved with independence, undiminished authority, outside his own mind: it was hard to believe he had authored them himself.

And the word "author" is no coincidence.  Dreaming is not a conscious or deliberate act, but sometimes neither is writing a story, and both are a process of describing the world using the unreliable tools we are given, up to and including those who have been most real to us.  You can tell a story about your dead mother, or you can dream about her, but is the story you are really telling, and every story, about yourself?  In "Tell Me Yes or No," a woman imagines a really complicated chain of events in which she travels to a faraway city where a man lived, and recently died, whom she had pursued a brief flirtation.  She hangs around his widow's bookstore, she gets spotted, and given a sheaf of letters, which she takes, but--here's the twist--the letters are not hers, they are from some other woman.  But what do we make of the way Munro has framed the story, gently remind us in the end that none of this "really" happened?:

Never mind.  I invented her.  I invented you, as far as my purposes go.  I invented loving you and I invented your death.  I have my tricks and my trap doors, too.  I don't understand their workings at the present moment, but I have to be careful, I won't speak against them.

The story of the flirtation and the letters would be good, would be Munrovian, enough.  The pretense of imagination actually throws the story off kilter somehow, and makes it deeply, perhaps intentionally, unsatisfying.  Munro, one of the least stylistically artificial writers I know, feels compelled to remind is that all of it is a fiction.  Like the protagonist of "Walking on Water," and the storyteller in "Yes or No," Munro seems to believe that the engines that drive storytelling are inscrutable, they happen at the level of instinct.  In "The Ottawa Valley," a woman telling a story about her mother (it's always mothers) tells us, "Yet I have not invented it, I really believe it.  Without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on."  You have to trust the thing that tells stories in you, Munro says, even as you know the stories are not the same as the real.

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You is also obsessed with hippies.  That makes sense: as a collection it was released in 1974.  The elderly man of "Walking on Water" befriends a young hippie man who tries, and fails, to walk on water like Jesus, but the practical failure of his attempt only emphasizes the gulf between their understandings of the world.  In "Marrakesh," an old woman watches her daughter grow up into hippiedom, and thinks of how different women are these days, who move "as smoothly as eels among their varied and innocent and transitory loves."  The forgiveness in "Forgiveness in Families" is granted toward the sibling who has taken up with a bunch of Hare Krishna-types.  It seems a bit quaint, this use of hippie culture to mark the alienating effects of time, but it works because Munro is too wise to think of such change as anything but cyclical.  And she fascinates, too, because so often she writes from the perspective of the conventional, understanding its appeal far better than most:

You know, everybody knows, the catalogue of delusions we described to in the fifties; it is too easy to mock them, to announce that maturity was indicated by possession of automatic washers and a muting of political discontent, by addiction to childbearing and station wagons.  Too easy and not the whole truth, because it leaves out something that was appealing, I think, in our heaviness and docility, our love of limits.

What a finely tuned thing to write, I think, and not detract from the fierce undercurrent of feminism that runs through almost all of Munro's stories.  My favorite here is the black-hearted "Material," about a woman who thinks with regret on her first marriage, to a self-absorbed writer who hadn't yet made it big.  She writes about how once he turned off a noisy pump, knowing it might flood the apartment of the eccentric woman downstairs, so he could sleep better, and thus write better.  What a terrific expression of the cruelty of self-professed male genius, which victimizes real women under the pretense of art.  (Lord knows we've seen examples enough of that in the past year.)  But years later, Hugo writes a story about her, the neighbor, and the narrator must admit that it's very good:

How honest this is and how lovely, I had to say as I read.  I had to admit.  I was moved by Hugo's story; I was, I am, glad of it, and I am not moved by tricks.  Or if I am, they have to be good tricks.  Lovely tricks, honest tricks.  There is Dotty lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvelous clear jelly that Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make.  It is an act of magic, there is no getting around it; it is an act, you might say, of special, unsparing, unsentimental love.  A fine and lucky benevolence.  Dotty was a lucky person, people who understand and value this act might say (not everybody, of course, does understand and value this act); she was lucky to live in that basement for a few months and eventually to have this done to her, though she doesn't know what has been done and wouldn't care for it, probably, if she did know.  She has passed into Art.  It doesn't happen to everyone.

This incredible passage returns us to the metafictional stuff I mentioned, the obsession with how the fact of a life is transmuted into narrative in its many forms.  Hugo does it, but so does the narrator in her own account of Dotty, and so does Munro, who should not be pardoned because Dotty wasn't real; she's real enough.  The contradictory nature of the act is captured in the oxymoron "honest tricks," and that's what a good story is: a trick you let someone play on you, which somehow reflects the truth of the world.  This act she calls an "act of love," the gift of noticing Dotty--if you want to write about life, the narrator told Hugo once upon a time, you ought to write about Dotty--and putting her on the page.  Nor is the love lessened by the presumption that Dotty would reject it.

But how does that act of love balance against the cruelty of the pump?  The question goes to the very heart of the discussion we cannot stop ourselves from having, about the moral value of art, and how it can or cannot be extricated from malice.  Can we read a kind of self-incrimination, a confession that writing about a person can be both love and erasure?  Or does the accusation extend only to men and their suffering muses?  Just when you think Munro, a master of the unresolved, is going to leave us with only questions to ponder, the narrator scribbles out this letter to her ex-husband:

This is not enough, Hugo.  You think it is, but it isn't.  You are mistaken.

There you go.  It's not enough.

Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.  Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in.  He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist.  He was not alive when this century started.  I will be barely alive--old, old--when it ends.  I do not like to think of it.  I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.

Gosh.  If I could write like anyone in the world, I'd write like Alice Munro.  In so many ways her writing is so unextraordinary--there's nothing particularly strange, or experimental, about her--but it always seems to me the embodiment of the mot juste, the search for the perfect word.  Who else but Alice Munro can describe the "snowdrifts curled around our house like sleeping whales?"

Dance of the Happy Shades is especially affecting because it's Munro's first collection.  I don't want to know how old she was when she wrote these stories; I'm sure it would depress me.  The stories are incredibly self-assured, but do very similar things; they lack a kind of structural weirdness that characterizes some of the stories in Runaway or Dear Life.  They're very similar to Lives of Girls and Women, my favorite, and in fact at least two of the stories are narrated by Del Jordan, the narrator of all the stories in Girls and Women.  Kind of like a dry run, I guess.  Those stories are excellent: in one, Del accompanies her traveling salesman father to a house of a strange woman whom she discovers is her father's old flame.  In another, she and her father end up at the house of a strange, mentally challenged, possibly dangerous man who gives his cat whiskey.  They keep it a secret between them:

Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared ot live happily ever after--like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.

These "slice of life" stories epitomize the idea that domestic lives are "deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum," as she writes in Girls and Women.  They share something with the epiphanic moments of Joyce, in which ordinary life becomes elevated for a moment, but Munro always manages to suggest that all of life has the potential for that superadded meaning or elevation.

I particularly loved a story called "The Office," which might have been autobiographical.  The narrator, an amateur writer, wants an office to do her writing in.  It's impossible, she says, for a woman to write at home:

A house is all right for a man to work in.  He brings his work into the house, a place is cleared for it; the house rearranges itself as best it can around him  Everybody recognizes that his work exists.  He is not expected to answer the telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying, or feed the cat.  He can shut his door.  Imagine (I said) a mother shutting her door, and the children knowing she is behind it; why, the very thought of it is outrageous to them.  A woman who sits staring into space, into a country that is not her husband's or her children's is likewise known to be an offence against nature.  So a house is not the same for a woman.  She is not someone who walks into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again.  She is the house; there is no separation possible.

She finds an office, but the male landlord keeps bugging her with a kind of aggressive friendliness, or friendly aggression.  He brings her plants to make the office more like home, not realizing that "home" is the last thing she wants; he bugs her with his own story, thinking that she, as a writer might like to use it.  When she rebuffs his presumptions, he begins to believe conspiratorial things about her, accusing her of using the office as a place for secret sex trysts.  Ultimately, she's forced to give up the office.  Virginia Woolf wrote about the necessity of women having "a room of one's own," and "The Office" is the story of just how difficult such a thing can be to come by for women.  It's simple and it wears Woolf's idea on its sleeve, but the story wrings a great deal of power out of this single idea.

Runaway by Alice Munro

That was another world they had been in, surely.  As much as any world concocted on the stage.  Their flimsy arrangement, their ceremony of kisses, the foolhardy faith enveloping them that everything would sail ahead as planned.  Move an inch this way or that, in such a case, and you're lost.

The last collection of Munro's stories that I read Dear Life, was full of terrific moments but lacked a sense of finish or completeness.  Some of it was strangely experimental, whatever that means for Munro--perhaps suggestive or impressionistic.  But perhaps that's only true in the context of Munro's other work, like the collection Runaway, in which each story is so perfectly realized and self-contained that it seems like a coup against the plainness of the lives about which Munro writes.  Each story in Runaway is like a little novel in itself.

Munro's big theme is the ways that men terrorize women.  Blink and you'll miss it; she writes so calmly about such ordinary people that you might well not notice the parallels.  The first and title story is more explicit than most: Carla, a young woman who rejected her parents in order to marry her Bohemian husband, has slowly discovered that he is monstrously cruel.  A neighbor, an older woman whose poet husband has just died, is determined to help her run away, and sets her up with friends in Toronto.  Carla's story neatly parallels that of her goat Flora, who has gone missing.  (One of my favorite sentences in the whole collection is: "Clark posted a Lost Goat notice on the Web.")  Carla gets cold feet, and her husband shows up at Sylvia's door to shout at her, when Flora appears out of the mist:

She did not sleep, thinking of the little goat, whose appearance out of the fog seemed to her more and more magical.  She even wondered if, possibly, Leon could have had something to do with it.  if she was a poet she would write a poem about something like this.  But in her experience the subjects that she thought a poet could write about did not appeal to Leon.

It seems almost too literary, and it is.  We find out at the end of the story that the neat, poetic ending is not really the ending at all, and what really happened was less coincidental and more shocking.  I won't spoil it, but I was floored by how Munro deftly plays into our expectations of plot and symbolism, and then rebukes them.  Life is not a story, she says, cruelty is not always redeemed by beauty or by art.

I could write similarly about every story in the collection.  Three of them are about a woman, Juliet, who tries to forge a life in the furthest reaches of British Columbia with a man she meets on a train.  The stories might as well be about different people, for the thinness of their connecting threads, but something about linking them together makes each feel more profound.  I particularly liked a Munrovian dash of dark humor in the first, "Chance," in which Juliet is unable to flush her menstrual blood down the train toilet that has just stopped because it hit a suicide on the tracks.  Later, she overhears a conversation:

The woman talking to her said softly, "That's what she said.  Full of blood.  So it must have splashed in when the train went over--"

"Don't say it."

Juliet had rejected the man's advances earlier, before he hopped off the train and killed himself.  The menstrual blood is symbolically complex, suggesting a kind of feminine guilt for not giving into the sad demands of male sexuality.  But beyond that it's really funny--and it's not the first time that Munro has used menstruation for that kind of bleak joke.

Other stories tell about a provincial woman reputed to be psychic; a girl who is stalked by a woman who believes her to be a child she once gave up for adoption; a woman whose brief fling with an alcoholic precedes his death in a car accident.  Each one is really something.

Dear Life by Alice Munro

Ships lost at sea and then, most dreadfully, a civilian boat, a ferry, sunk between Canada and Newfoundland, that close to our own shores.

That night I could not sleep and walked the streets of the town.  I had to think of the people gone to the bottom of the sea.  Old women, nearly old women like my mother, hanging on to their knitting.  Some kid bothered by a toothache.  Other people who had spent their last half hour before drowning complaining of seasickness.  I had a very strange feeling that was part horror and part--as near as I can describe it--a kind of chilly exhilaration.  The blowing away of everything, the equality--I have to say it--the equality, all of a sudden, of people like me and worse than me and people like them.

If Alice Munro's Dear Life has a theme, it's the way that men oppress women.  Munro's touch is so light that you might not notice, and her love and respect of the minutiae of domestic life can look a lot like traditionalism.  But it's there in "Amundsen," a story about a woman who takes a job teaching children being treated for tuberculosis at a far outpost, only to be romanced, and then abandoned, by the town's haughty doctor.  It's there in "Gravel," about a mother who is too absorbed with the hippie lifestyle of her new beau that she fails to see her daughter's unhappiness, with tragic results.  It's there in "To Reach Japan," about a woman who lets herself have a shocking affair aboard a train, only to be racked with guilt about leaving her daughter alone in the cabin.  It's there in "Corrie," about a woman who realizes--after decades--that there was never really a blackmailer, and that her lover's been pocketing all the hush money.

Brent said this was his first introduction to Munro, and it took him a while to get into it.  I can see that--nothing here strikes me on the same level as the best parts of The Lives of Girls and Women or The Passage of Love.  I mention those stories above because they stuck with me the most, but there's a lot I have already forgotten: weird little slice-of-life tales that don't quite seem more than a slice.  (What's "In Sight of the Lake" about?  I can't recall even a little.)  But when Munro is good, she really is the best.  "Gravel" especially is a masterpiece of short fiction.  Munro's choice not to follow the voice of the girl, or the mother, but the girl's younger sister, as mystified by the actions of her older sister as she is of her mother, is so simple, but the kind of authorial choice that reflects her brilliance.

The best part of the collection, though, is the "Finale": a quartet of semi-autobiographical tales that Munro calls "the first and last--and the closest--things I have to say about my own life."  (Can we talk about Munro's mastery of the em-dash?)  These stories have the ring of truth; they feel real in a way that the calculated packaging of most of the collection's stories do not.  I particularly loved a story about Munro, seized in the middle of the night by the fleeting thought that she might, if she wanted, strangle her sister in the bunk bed below.  She slips out of the house every night and wanders town, unable to deal with this thought, which surely makes her a freak, only to encounter her father, waiting up for her, who says, in effect, that everyone has thoughts like that.  Of course they do.  But it's the province of great writers to put into words the things we are unaware of, or too afraid to say, and I think I'd have been to afraid to put a thought like that, dredged up even from my childhood, to paper.  Instead of the O. Henry-esque turn of some of the fictional stories in the collection, Munro gives us a classic reflection on the intersection of family and private fear:

However, on that breaking morning he gave me just what I needed to hear and what I was even to forget about soon enough.

I have thought that he was maybe in his better work clothes because he had a morning appointment to go to the bank, to learn, not to his surprise, that there was no extension to his loan.  He had worked as hard as he could but the market was not going to turn around and he had to find an new way of supporting us and paying off what we owed at the same time.  Or he may have found out there was a name for my mother's shakiness and that it was not going to stop.  Or that he was in love with an impossible woman.

Never mind.  From then on I could sleep.

The Progress of Love by Alice Munro

Fifty years too late to ask, Sam thinks.  And even at the time he was too amazed.  Edgar became a person he didn't know.  Callie drew back, into her sorry female state.  The moment of happiness he shared with them remained in his mind, but he never knew what to make of it.  Do such moments really mean, as they seem to, that we have a life of happiness with which we only occasionally, knowingly, intersect?  Do they shad such light before and after all that has happened to us in our lives--or that we've made happen--can be dismissed?

I was blown away by Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women.  It was one of those books that made me feel, this is what literature ought to be.  But it wasn't really representative of Munro's body of work, which is defined by the short story.  (Lives, though separated into titled stories, is really a novel about a single character, Del Jordan.)  So I've been excited to read a collection of Munro's stories--do they have the same kind of depth and power?

Mostly, yes.  The stories of The Progress of Love tread similar ground as Lives.  They center around small moments in domestic life which have immense consequences, like ripples in water.  Sometimes those consequences are literal ones, other times they are merely shades of feeling which resound throughout the lives of the characters.  Many of these stories stretch over several years, and some decades.  In Lives, Munro argued that the depth of experiences in ordinary lives is as profound as any other, calling these lives "deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."  The Progress of Love reads, sometimes, like an elaboration on this essential thesis.

One of my favorites was "Miles City, Montana," about a couple on a road trip who endure a frightening moment when their young daughter almost drowns in a swimming pool.  Another, "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink," is about a pair of brother who run away from a town where one of them has impregnated a young servant girl, only to find her having followed them, disguised as a girl, on to the train on which they were making their escape.  It turns out to be a happy moment, full of the promise of a new life (in Toronto!), and a moment of sheer joy which the rest of their lives have trouble matching or living up to.  In "Miles City, Montana" it's a moment of fear and shock, but like "The Moon," both moments seem to open briefly on another plane of life, one which is lived more intensely, and exists parallel to the ordinary one.  Another story, "Fits," is about a practical housewife who seems not be affected by the discovery of a murder-suicide in the house next door.  It, too, is about the way this other kind of life sometimes intrudes upon our own.

Other stories don't succeed as well.  I was baffled by the extended dream sequence in "Eskimo," which otherwise takes place on an airplane.  The longest story, "White Dump," is full of incredible moments--my favorite is a grandmother, swimming naked in a lake, who watches a group of hippies steal her cigarettes and destroy her bathrobe on the shore--but is such a chronological jumble that it's difficult to piece together in a meaningful way.

The one most similar to Lives--and therefore, I thought, one of the strongest--is "Jesse and Meribeth," which captures the nature of friendship between young girls, like Lives did.  (At least, it seems to me to capture it, though maybe Chloe can confirm when her review of Lives goes up.)  Jessie invents an affair with an older man to impress her friend Mary Beth, only to be rebuked by the man who has correctly intuited something of Jessie's family life:

Isn't it true that all the people I know in this world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of by imagination?  It's true.  He has hit the nail on the head, as Aunt Ena is fond of saying.  But hitting the nail on the head in a matter like things, in a matter of intimate failure, isn't apt to make people abashed and grateful and eager to change their ways.  Pride hardens, instead, over the nakedly perceived fault.  Pride hardens, pride deals with all those craven licks of sweetness, douses the hope of pleasure, the deep-seated glow of invitation.  What do I want with anybody who can know so much about ne?  In fact, if I could wipe him off the face of the earth now, I would.

It's these finely modulated expressions of human thinking that I find most powerful about Munro's work.  There's nothing particularly earth-shattering about them--no formal boundary-pushing, no experimentalism--but she does it better than almost anybody.

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable--deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

One of the most fulfilling things about this project, for me, is the revelation that comes when you are totally blown away by a book or an author you had not expected.  Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping was like that, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, and so is Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women.  It's not just that these books are better than I had expected them to be, but that they remind me of how good books really can be; they belong, if you ask me, among the very best fiction the modern era has produced, and without this project I would have likely never have read them.  It's nice to have your suspicions confirmed--that there are great authors out there, still in a way hidden like veins of oil or ore, underground.  The fact that all three of them are women may be a coincidence, and it may be further evidence that women authors still lack the kind of cultural prestige they deserve.

I have to admit that the title of Munro's collection didn't compel me to read it.  Lives of Girls and Women brings to mind a lot of sentimentalist genre fiction, or something that might be adapted by the Lifetime Channel.  And to be sure, that is what the book is about.  The mother of these stories' narrator, Del Jordan, employs the phrase in a characteristic piece of advice:

"There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women.  Yes.  But it is up to us to make it come.  All women have had up till now has been their connection with men.  All we have had.  No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals.  He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.  Tennyson wrote that.  It's true.  Was true.  You will want to have children, though."

That was how much she knew me.

What Del's mother says, of course, is true.  But in its dry, encyclopedic manner it fails to understand the experience of what it means to be a girl in love, and the deep attraction to the mystery of sex.  Del is smart and ambitious, but she in her turn falls in love with a local rustic named Garnet French.  Garnet is no intellectual match for Del, but he is raw and physical and she has her first intercourse with him in the yard outside of their home:

In the morning I went around the broken peonies and a little patch of blood, yes, dried blood on the ground.  I had to mention it to somebody.  I said to my mother, "There's blood on the ground at the side of the house."

"Blood?"

"I saw a cat there yesterday tearing a bird apart.  It was from a big striped tom, I don't know where it came from."

"Vicious beasts."

"You should come and take a look at it."

"What?  I've got better things to do."

Del knows, like her mother, that there is something deeper in the relationship between men and women than the stiff intellectualism her mother--who travels around the county selling encyclopedias--will allow.  She knows that this depth is part of a story that plays out timelessly even in the provincial Ontario backwater of Jubilee that is there home.  As she says in the passage I quoted above, the lives of people everywhere are like "deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."  In this way she counters male critics who have no patience for stereotypically "feminine" writing (I'm thinking of V. S. Naipaul's dismissals of Jane Austen).  Munro knows that--for men as well as women--domestic life is just life, and that life itself has its profundity and mysteries wherever it is found.

The sexual themes of Lives of Girls and Women don't really appear until the second half, though, when Del is old enough to ponder them.  The first few stories of the book, when Del is younger, deal with old literary mainstays like family, death, and faith.  With a book this good, it's best, maybe to just get out of the way and let it speak for itself.  Here's young Del considering the corpse of a cow in the woods:

Being dead, it invited desecration.  I wanted to poke it, trample it, pee on it, anything to punish it, to show what contempt I had for its being dead.  Beat it up, break it up, spit on it, tear it, throw it away!  But still it had power, lying with a gleaming strange map on its back, its straining neck, the smooth eye.  I had never once looked at a cow alive and thought what I thought now: why should there be a cow?  Why should the white spots be shaped just the way they were, and never again, not on any cow or  creature, shaped in exactly the same way?  Tracing the outline of a continent again, digging the stick in, trying to make a definite line, I paid attention to its shape as I would sometimes pay attention to the shape of real continents or islands on real maps, as if the shape itself were a revelation beyond words, and I would be able to make sense of it, if I tried hard enough, and had time.

Another story, "The Age of Faith," is one of the best stories I've ever read about religious life:

If God could be discovered, or recalled, everything would be safe.  Then you would see the things that I saw--just the dull grain of the wood in the floor boards, the windows of plain glass filed with thin branches and snowy sky--and the strange, anxious pain that just seeing things could create would be gone.  It seemed plain to me that this was the only way the world could be borne, the only way it could be borne--if all those atoms, galaxies of atoms, were safe all the time, whirling away in Gods' mind.  How could people rest, how could they even go on breathing and existing, until they were sure of this?  they did go on, so they must be sure.

As Del grows older, these themes don't so much disappear as become incorporated into the themes of womanhood and sex, as if Munro is making us aware that death and faith are as much a part of that pair as anything else.  Like Fitzgerald, she peoples Jubilee with a set of distinct, fascinating characters--a literary feat that I think is often taken for granted, so difficult it is--and like Robinson, she understands and communicates the powerful death of ordinary life.  However removed our petty existences might seem from the most powerful mysteries of the universe, Munro says, in truth they are our only way of confronting them, and for that they deserve savoring.