Alice Munro: Selected Stories

Alice Munro, last year's Nobel Laureate, was the first to win that award for primarily writing short stories. She has written one novel, but it is her stories that have occupied her sixty-year career. I've read a few of them over the years, but plunged knee-deep into her work with a copy of Selected Stories, which culls 28 of her best stories over the arc of her career.

Munro, a Canadian, is also a writer who very rarely leaves behind her home, specifically rural Ontario, near Lake Huron. I would have to go back and check, but I believe everyone of her stories in this collection is set there, with perhaps a few deviations to Toronto or Vancouver. Many of the stories are firmly rooted in rural life, such as "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You," "Ottawa Valley," "Postcard," "Simon's Luck," or "Royal Beatings." A few have recurring characters, like Rose, who grows up in simpler times, but has just as complicated a life as anyone today. In one of the Rose stories, "The Beggar Maid," the first line is: "Patrick Blatchford was in love with Rose.This had become a fixed, even furious idea with him. For her, a continual surprise."

Other stories show the dichotomy of country and city life. "The Chaddeleys and Flemings" is a wonderful story about old aunts who visit a woman now living in Vancouver. "The Moons of Jupiter" deals with a young woman visiting her dying father in a hospital in Toronto. "White Dump," another of the best here, deals with folks living in a lake house on Huron, and one that gets the familiar phrase, "drove up from Toronto." This is the same with perhaps my favorite of all the stories, "Lichen," in which a man visits his ex-wife with his new wife in tow, and there is nothing amiss about this.

Some of my other favorites: "Fits," about a couple who are found dead by a neighbor, who for some reason doesn't tell anyone in town about it; "Dulse," set in a resort town on New Brunswick, which is where Willa Cather spent her summers, and "Miles City, Montana," about a Canadian family driving across the U.S. who narrowly avoid a tragedy in the town of the title. I also loved "Turkey Season," about a girl who gets a job on a turkey farm.

Munro's characters and plots are deceptively simple. They are about people who anyone can identify with, those people who show up in old photo albums and you realize they each have a story. She can also write a devastating sentence. I was stopped dead by this one: "'I love this house,' she says with a soft vehemence.'" Soft and vehemence would seem to be opposites, but yet I can just hear this woman's inflection. Or, "Everything he told her could easily have been a lie," which is sort of a primal truth in fiction, but rarely exposed so well.

Here are some other pearls: "Ladner did not own a dog. He was his own fierce dog." "The idea was--Sophie's idea always was--to make her own son look foolish. To make him look a fool in front of his wife wife and children. Which he did, standing above Sophie on the veranda, with the shamed blood rising hotly up his neck, staining his ears, his voice artificially lowered to sound a manly reproach, but trembling. That was what Sophie could do, would do, every time she got the chance."

I'll close with the opening of one of my favorites, "Differently." "Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think." The punchline comes two paragraphs later: "The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together."

I will add that possibly Munro's best-known story "The Bear Went Over the Mountain," which was made into a well-received film called Away From Her, was for some reason not included here.