Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

Alice Munro is my favorite living writer. Everyone else pales in comparison. My favorite stories in this collection were "Queenie" and "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." Although some other reviewers praised the title story, it was probably my least favorite in the book. (It seemed a little implausible.) I will say that her writing is an acquired taste--one cannot fully appreciate her stories on the first read. It takes me two or three times reading a story to catch all of her references, themes, and symbols. I like reading Munro because of her subtlety. Unlike some other writers of today (e.g. Toni Morrison) who beat you over the head with their heavy-handed symbolism and ideology, Munro focuses on telling a story in which emotions and meaning brew beneath the surface. I have read my favorite Munro story, "Royal Beatings," which is in her "Selected Stories" collection, 8 or 10 times and I never get tired of it. I think some readers are too quick to dismiss her stories as mundane because they revolve around everyday events in the lives of ordinary people. But that is what makes her writing so awe-inspiring--her ability to give profound meaning to the struggles of average characters who are all too human, who are very much like you or me.

Why would I impulsively urge teenagers to resist [other books]and read Alice Munro? Because, I suspect, they'd be lucky to be set anything that good in post-modern high school.Munro plunged early into her first marriage and child bearing. There was more to her than the "reproductive daze, swamped by maternal juices", to borrow her sarcasm. She was not drowning, but saving ammunition. She published her first book at 37 and is still there at 70. Language, sex, love, marriage, fate and death - Munro knows all their rhymes. The title for her 11th book comes from an imagined girls' game, along the lines of he loves me-he loves me not. The leading situations of the stories appear simple, repetitive even. Johanna, a stolid home-help, is lured onto the cross-Canada train by faked courtship letters. A widow has to settle affairs after her husband's planned suicide. Suffering cancer, a wife savours a single kiss with a cocky youth. One aspiring writer discovers new slants on sin and death, and another rediscovers a now-married childhood sweetheart. While one young mother realises the smallness of her married life, another discerns the subtle point of a one-day affair. An older woman puzzles over the fate of Queenie, her lost stepsister. Routinely, Munro stories take 30-40 pages to get from A to B and back through A again. She is a competitive writer in the best sense, almost preferring death to a failure to engage. She is determined to create some reverberations that the dutiful reader cannot help but absorb. In Munro, I will accommodate habits that are annoying in lesser writers. I don't mind hearing one more time how she found her vocation. No matter if a single story wants to wander wilfully over three generations. Not a problem if the final paragraph charts the future life course of a principal character. The disposition of restraint that greatly enhances the stories is the author's crystalline, yet charitable, view of human nature. The time-honoured technique that brings her view to life is an unerring ability to recreate regional speech and manners. Laid out before Munro's eye, a crudely aspiring Southern Ontario dinner table presents fine gradations of behaviour that would do an oriental court proud. "There had to be far too much food, and most of the conversation had to do with the food," recalls her first aspiring writer. "There was a feeling that conversation that passed beyond certain understood limits might be a disruption, a showing-off. My mother's understanding of the limits was not reliable, and she sometimes could not wait out the pauses or honor the aversion to follow-up." Reduced to an "information machine", Johanna's station agent decides that she lacks country manners, indeed has no manners at all. Not for his eyes are the nuances at Milady's, where Johanna blurts out her marriage plans while choosing a travelling dress. This is how Munro closes off the scene: "She must have felt she ow

Alice Munro is the eminent Canadian award winning author of international fame. It is remarkable to find that Alice Munro is the only living author with a full-time professional career spent in writing short fiction. Her standards and her talent are quite breathtaking. She pours into each of her short stories the feeling of various Canadian regions and their characters, while offering appurtenance to the lives of her readers around the world. This is definitely not provincial writing, but worldly. In addition, she delivers the depth of a novel into many of her short works. Her new collection contains seven stories of roughly the same length,each around thirty pages,with two novellas of around 50 pages each serving as bookends. They are a treat. First off, Marriage, takes place in a small town when trains still joined communities and people wrote letters. It starts with a woman, Johanna, who wants to ship furniture to Saskatchewan. For why? Everyone is curious. Half the town knows the stationmaster personally, and guesswork pours over coffee cups. By end of the story we learn Johanna could have benefited from the advice a Toronto judge recently gave a neophyte lawyer, Don't ever assume anything.Floating Bridge is next. An Ontario woman named Jinny examines the reasons for her petty anger, out of which she comes to terms with her cancer. In a story called Comfort, religious-right creationists edge their way into a school, and begin to make life uncomfortable for a science instructor teaching evolution. What is Remembered, set in Vancouver and Victoria concerns the chance meeting between a bush pilot-doctor and a woman who has just attended the funeral of her husband's friend who may have committed suicide. Here, while telling a slight story, Munro's writing brilliantly captures the unease between the two. Most of the stories appear to occur in the immediate past, when rental cars had no radios, and many people smoked and spoke of ciggie-boos. Yet, they deal with current high-profile issues such as euthanasia, and coping with old age deterioration. Five of these first appeared in the New Yorker. All are of consistent high quality.

Alice Munro's short stories don't always impress me -- some seem too sedate, others too offbeat. However, this collection was very enjoyable. The lead story, which shares its title with the book, is wonderfully ironic and very well written, with characters that are drawn quickly and even sketchily, and yet they have such depth that if I were a critic, I would consider this Munro's masterpiece. All the stories in this collection refer to acts of love, but they are realistic. A woman has an affair that lasts a few hours but in her memories is maintained for a lifetime. Old childhood friends meet again as adults with the outcome far more and far less than the woman expected (the man, as usual, expected nothing). Women learn about themselves not just through romantic relationships but through the loving or non-loving family relationships they find. These are good stories, moving at the calm pace of reminiscences. Very well done. I was sorry when I finished the last story. I wanted more.