The Moons of Jupiter

I won't tell you what to look for or how to feel when you read Alice Munro. If you've never encountered her before, The Moons of Jupiter is the best place to start, early Munro at the height of her evocative powers. Don't turn to the Selected Stories first. Each of Munro's books is a suite of stories, interlocking in themes and often in characters, on the model of a sonata, a suite of musical movements. The experience of reading the whole suite is more powerful than the sum of the separate stories. Perhaps the story-suite is the successor to the floundering form of the modern novel. By the way, Munro is admittedly a woman writng about women for women to read, but I'm an outdoors guy, a baseball fan, a weight-lifter, and at least until my son was born something of a rascal, despite all of which I rank Alice Munro very high among my favorite fiction writers.

In The Moons of Jupiter, Munro clearly reveals the universal perplexities of our everyday lives. The characters have a rich realness to them and must be commended for their candid honesty. The strength of this book lies in Munro's ability to create a genuine perspective in which the reader has no choice than to become emotionally connected to the characters. I enjoyed these stories because there are many "grey areas" in which the reader must rely on his own experiences to draw conclusions. There are no definative endings to these stories. They are written in such a way that there is often a fine line between hope and despondence; only the reader's morals and values can recognize one from the other.