[Alice Munro is] a writer who has quietly and firmly established herself over the past decade. In a very real sense, she occupies [two] fictional worlds: her fiction is rooted tangibly in the social realism of the rural and small town world of her own experience, but it insistently explores what lies beyond the bounds of empirical reality. Though she has said that she is "very, very excited by what you might call the surface of life," the substance of her fiction to date suggests that this excitement must also derive in part from her intuitive feeling that there is something else of significance just below that literal surface. This may be one reason why to date she has been more attracted to the short story than to the novel…. [That] more concentrated fictional form probably allows her to explore in a more imaginative and intense way the intangible aspects of her world: those shadowy and shifting areas between the rational and the irrational, between the familiar, comfortable world and sudden dimensions of terror, and between various facets of uncertainty and illusion.

These metaphysical concerns find their aesthetic and formal complements in the structures of her fiction, where a similar illusory balance operates between the conventional fictional elements of plot and character on the one hand, and on the other, a kind of psychological or even psychic verification or resolution of a particular dilemma. Though emanating from a recognizable sociological reality, the situations that are characteristically depicted in her fiction frequently transcend the literal bounds of our conscious realizations, and leave us with a residual uncertainty, puzzlement, or even despair. (pp. 56-7)

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You … essentially picks up on the same themes and concerns as [Munro's] two earlier works, Dance of the Happy Shades and Lives of Girls and Women. In most of this fiction, Munro is the chronicler of a particular region, that of south-western Ontario…. (pp. 57-8)

Alice Munro's fiction could profitably be examined in terms of the themes of isolation and rejection, which unfold in situations where human relationships are rarely cemented or consummated…. [For example, in the short story "The Peace of Utrecht," home], the past, family ties—forces which are conventionally interpreted as positive forces—are … dramatized as disturbing elements, and the narrator even defines "home" as a "dim world of continuing disaster."… (p. 58)

It is [the] intangible or irrational impulses between the protagonist and some other element—other characters, the past or childhood, a code of morality or behaviour—which give Munro's fiction its haunting and disturbing quality…. In Munro's first two books, the emphasis was on the youthful protagonist trying to come to terms with the adult world, but in her latest collection it is frequently the other way around: grandmothers trying to understand granddaughters ("Marrakesh"), elderly sisters trying to make sense out of their common past ("Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You"), a sensitive old man just failing to come to terms with the younger generation around him ("Walking on Water"). (pp. 61-2)

[There is] an underlying element in Munro's fiction in general, and [it] is an irony which both enlarges the possibilities of experience and helps define her characters' specific attributes that operate within a given situation. In some cases, the irony is delightful and benign, as in "How I Met My Husband," which is not without its touches of an O. Henry or Somerset Maugham ending: inevitably combined with moral relief. (p. 65)

A more complex and essentially unresolved effect of irony and ambiguity is reflected in such stories as "Tell Me Yes or No" from her latest collection, or "The Office" from Dance of the Happy Shades. In this latter story, all the circumstantial evidence convicts the landlord right off: Mr. Malley is unpleasant, deceitful, dishonest, and perhaps even lecherous, in his dealings with the narrator, a writer who simply wished to use the office as a creative refuge away from her domestic demands. But there are many other layers of meaning here, and we are drawn into the basic dilemma about the nature of reality. The narrator, as a writer, rearranges words to create her version of reality that takes its authority through the workings of imagination; the landlord, as a hostile commentator on the whole idea of a woman writing outside the home, re-arranges or manipulates facts to create another version of reality, one that to the outsider is as credible as any work of fiction. What we have in this story is the simultaneous creation of two imaginative worlds, and in this process, Mr. Malley manages to transform his outrageous distortions into some semblance of truth. "I arrange words, and think it is my right to be rid of him,"… muses the narrator, but it is clear from the unresolved conclusion of this story that Mr. Malley's violations of her version of reality cannot be easily dismissed. (pp. 65-6)

[There is] a recurring pattern in Alice Munro's fiction: the dramatization of the conjunction of existential terror or desperation and existential possibility within a total vision that is much closer to faith than it is to despair. Worlds are always qualitatively changed at the conclusions of Munro's stories, and though the causal changes have contributed to the unsettling of her protagonists, they characteristically point to an enlargement of possibilities rather than a restriction, or they imply a resolution already attained…. There is a strong sense of amazement at the human condition in Munro, a quality that seems to be born of a recognition that ordinary people have an intangible talent or gift: not necessarily for goodness or truth or beauty, though that happens, too, but more frequently for lucking it out, for intuiting a move or an action which will get them out of a present predicament. At times, her characters appear to drift into salvation rather than consciously elect it, and their emergence into new possibilities is frequently accompanied by [a] kind of amazement…. This kind of realization constitutes what can be defined as an existentialist resolution, a phenomenon particularly relevant to the twentieth-century comic protagonist, to which category Munro's characters can essentially be said to belong. (pp. 67-8)

The total evidence in Alice Munro's fiction ultimately dictates that she cannot easily be categorized, and to say that she writes essentially in the comic mode, or that she is moving consistently beyond realism, reveals only part of the complexity of her art and vision. Her accomplishments offer gratifying evidence that fiction of significant substance, of careful craftsmanship, and of sympathetic treatment of the complexities of human relationships, is very much alive in Canada. All this is of course very much in the tradition of the realism of George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence or Robertson Davies, and as I indicated at the outset, Munro's fiction is strongly rooted in the realism of region and time. But in the Epilogue to Lives, [the protagonist] Del, by now an aspiring novelist and recorder of Jubilee's stories, recognizes the problems that she faces, as she visits Bobby Sherriff, out temporarily from the Asylum, and the last person she sees in Jubilee. "No list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting."… But Bobby from the Asylum reminds her—and us—that there is another world that is not so decipherable, as he suddenly rises in a graceful-grotesque manner and looks at Del in such a way that she construes his action "to be a letter, or a whole word, in an alphabet I did not know."… In a very real way, this unknown or irrational world has been as much a concern of Alice Munro as have any of the things she can list, and her very substantial contribution to our fiction lies in the successful way she has addressed herself to this dilemma, with the authority of the artist and the astonishment of the seer. (pp. 70-1)