SOURCE: "Never Ending Story," in Meanjin, Vol. 54, No. 2, 1995, pp. 233-40.

[In the following review, London praises Open Secrets as a mature work of Munro's that contains "stories of formidable urgency and integrity."]

Alice Munro has established an international readership based solely on the short story (in Australia we would use Frank Moorhouse's term and call her two novels 'discontinuous narratives'), an achievement which at this moment, in English, is rivalled only by that of Raymond Carver.

Her publishing life spans two decades of exceptional experimentation in the short story form, from postmodern metafiction to 'dirty' realism, from such writers as Barthelme, Barth and Carver in North America, Cower, Moorhouse and Garner in Australia. In the early eighties it reached a peak of critical approval and apparent popularity, which has now receded. In its single defining feature—brevity—the short story has always served as a vehicle for 'having a go', for the 'one-off', for starting out in fiction, or taking a break from longer work. Perhaps this is what keeps the form healthy, edgy, pluralistic: some of the best short stories have come into being this way. But to persist with the short story, collection after collection, to pursue its development over a long period, amounts to a vision as expressed through the form.

From the first, Alice Munro wrote her own sort of story. The form seemed integral to her voice and approach and it developed within her work as indistinguishable from the growth of her own experience and thought. In her practice the short story seems to have come alive, continually expanding its possibilities and range. Along the way she has created a following, and influenced a generation of short story writers.

It is probably always the case with major writers who are widely read by their contemporaries, that the particular story they have to tell is the one their generation is waiting to hear. Although the heartland of her fiction is rural Ontario, and her most direct antecedents are Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, Alice Munro's more contemporary version of rural life has fore-grounded the experience of women. The central consciousness of her earliest stories was that of a very young, angry, ambitious woman in a country town, like Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women (1971) who walks the streets of Jubilee "like an exile or a spy, not sure from which direction fame would strike, or when, only convinced from my bones out that it had to." The desire for escape and fulfilment and the issues this raised—such as the life and death struggle with the mother—exactly coincided with the flowering of the women's movement in the seventies, and with the determined reclamation of female experience in the writing of the era. And in the no-nonsense, righteous, Scottish/Irish conservatism of Alice Munro's country folk in town after fictional town, it was possible to identify the forces that a young woman of spirit was up against. Growing up in Jubilee or Hanratty or Dalgleish in the forties was not so different from growing up in suburban Australia a generation later.

Dislocation, it seems to me, is what usually makes a writer first break into a sustained work. Dislocation in time or place, dislocation from a former sense of self. This is mirrored in Alice Munro's earlier fiction: the escape from the provinces is usually achieved through marriage, which is sudden, surprising, dreamlike and entrapping. The young wife finds herself cut off from her ambitions, her class and the country roots which turn out to be after all her emotional touchstone. That is the first dislocation. The second is divorce, in which the eyes are set free to examine marriage and adultery and all the subsequent sexual relationships of the unattached woman. No other writer I can think of has explored so widely the centrality of sex within her cast of characters, or brought into such piercing focus the nuances of the couple, endlessly recast and replayed. And once again this preoccupation was in tune with contemporary experience and women's interest in defining themselves within it.

Dislocation is also a source of the texture of her work, the density of reference to the physical world, the attempt to capture the spirit of a place or person or feeling, of what Virginia Woolf called 'the thing in itself'. At the end of Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan says:

It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee … I would want to write things down … I would try to make lists … And 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 and walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting.

Open Secrets, Alice Munro's most recent book, has dismayed some of her readers. For such a sturdy realist to introduce a ghost, a spaceship, portentous visions, dreams and coincidences, not to mention a love pursuit in disguise which ends up in Brisbane and risks a musichall farfetchedness, is perhaps to court disquiet in the readership she has set up.

Yet she has been signalling these changes for some time now. Increasingly in her later work there has been a sense of challenge to closure, to the constraints of the form, an attempt to draw ever closer to the unyielding rawness of life. Some stories from her last two books would not be out of place here. One of the pleasures for me in this book was to sense both the connection with former work and the step forward, the exhilaration of breakthrough.

These stories are longer. Collection by collection her stories have lengthened, loosened, and as their scope has widened, the juxtapositions of their composition have become more extreme. She has always written of the past, the recent past or that of a generation earlier, but in Open Secrets her compass swings wider, goes back further—one of the stories is located in the pioneering past of 150 years ago—and then swings forward, bringing her characters' lives and those of their descendants into modernity, following them through to their effective end. The historical detail, the rendering of the tone, mores, decorum of the period, often through letters, is wonderfully achieved.

All but one of the stories is set in, or sets off from, Car-stairs, another version of Munro's country town. But if the earlier stories were about dislocation, these stories hinge about return. Return to a former site where a drama has occurred, or to a relationship which at the time seemed to be definitive, or to an aspect of experience which is only now seen to be definitive. The return to the home town, the meeting between the one who stayed and the one who got away, or between ex-lovers or spouses: this is familiar Munro territory. But over the years the meditative framework has changed. 'Great writers', said Chekhov, 'not only find a truth, but wrap it up and take it somewhere.' In Open Secrets, the emotions of these experiences are not only defined, they are given their retrospective place in the passage of the life. The transforming medium is that of time.

There is a sense of an overview, of pieces being put into place in the puzzle: a sense too of pieces which don't fit and the gaps that are left. Louisa in 'Carried Away', at the end of her life says: "It was anarchy she was up against—a devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations."

Within this vision, the connections made between lives may seem startling, may reach across continents and generations, or across the surface skin of what we accept as real: the ghost, the spaceship, the warning dream, while never 'proved', are shown as real forces in the life in which they occur. The endings, rather than homing in, may be jokily flat, or open out, situate in mystery, linger in feeling like "the darkness collecting, rising among the trees, like cold smoke coming off the snow."

There is an awareness of darkness in these stories, of dark forces which can only be sensed or felt. At the core of each there is a death, or imminent death, or an act of violence, often unsolved, unable to be explained. In Open Secrets, Munro takes a long look at unknowing, leaves some ends daringly untied, and for a story-teller this is risky. And yet every element in the stories seems meaningful. Traced through time, the mysteries are part of a widening acceptance of the eternal, 'radiant' opacity of life.

Sex and death: the source of the drama, and in these stories the two forces are intimately linked. But in counterpoise to this is a state of rest, from what she calls "a din, a battering, a sound of hammers in the street," the wrenching disturbance of sexual relationship. Some stories are set at the moment of cross-over.

'The Albanian Virgin' is the story which has attracted the most attention, not only because it is the first of Munro's stories to have an 'exotic' setting outside Canada (unless you count Brisbane), but because the figure of the Virgin, the woman who is allowed a life of independence provided she gives up sex, is such a resonant symbol for women, and one which recurs throughout this book. It is almost impossible not to read the story of Lottar's capture and escape in the Albanian mountains as allegory. In fact it can be read as a sort of mythical version of the provincial journey undertaken by the young women in Munro's earlier stories: the desire for adventure, the rebellious setting-off, the entrapment within a community of women-as-carers, the unwitting bride, and then the brief sojourn as a Virgin alone on the mountainside, discovering her own resourcefulness.

But the Franciscan priest who rescues Lottar falls in love with her, a realization as they part that takes "the breath out of her body, as she knew too late." Her fate has been decided. Like Dorrie in 'A Real Life', like Louisa in 'Carried Away', she is 'carried away' by a transforming force, chooses to leave the Virgin state for sexual love.

This is not, however, a romantic vision. Forty years on, the Franciscan priest is her husband, Gjurdhi, an obsessive peddlar, "a mangy but urgent old tiger." The narrator of 'The Albanian Virgin', one of Munro's confused young women who has left her husband (it is the early 60s), who, in an episode which parallels Lottar's escape is claimed by her lover Nelson, disguised in fedora and trenchcoat, says of her subsequent married life with Nelson:

We have been very happy.

I have often felt completely alone.

There is always in this life something to discover.

The days and years have gone by in sort of blur.

On the whole I am satisfied.

This could be offered as a version of her life by any of the long-married women in this book: ordinary women whose lives have been formed by accommodation (as perhaps have the husbands' too: one character talks of "chubby husbands … bent on a lifelong course of appeasement"), but also by what can be seen as extraordinary moments, so that this list of truisms is both confirmed and challenged.

Fedora and trenchcoat: the notion of disguise in the love quest has long fascinated Munro. It is the theme of the story 'Wigtime' in Friend of My Youth (1990). It was first mentioned in her definitive meditation on obsessive love, set in Brisbane, 'Bardon Bus' (Moons of Jupiter, 1982). In 'The Jack Randa Hotel', Munro returns to Brisbane, and the story of the pursuit from Canada of Will by Gail, in disguise, the hair-dye dripping down her neck in the Australian heat, takes the quest to painstaking, absurd lengths. Perhaps for Australian readers, observed as others see us, even the setting is a little surreal, "this country of non-stop blooming and impudent bird life," of men rowdily drinking beer beneath dazzling jacaranda blossoms, of women with "dim, soft, freckly, blinking faces." It's as if the whole action of the story surreally enacts the caperings, the antics, the pain that people put themselves through for love. And get through. Gail watches an unpleasant old man in a wheelchair who lives in her apartment building with a young male carer. She catches the young man crying one night outside at the rubbish bins and, in a moment of identification with him, realizes he is the old man's lover. Gail's identity is revealed to Will from an ambulance just as the old man, who has collapsed and is clutching her hand, the hand of a stranger, dies. When Will comes after her, calling to her through her keyhole, she finds that "Words most wished for can change … Love—need—forgive. Love—need—forever … hammers in the street." This time death is the transforming force. She runs away from Will, from the mad game of her quest, and flies home. From there, playfully, bountifully, like a god tossing up a 'shower of gold', she relents to life again, and throws the ball in his court.

Unaccountable forces create a field of energy in the story 'Spaceships Have Landed'. Rhea, in 1953, drunk, kisses her boyfriend Billy Doud's friend, Wayne, also drunk, at the back door of the local bootlegger's house. Just before she passes out, she hears him say "I'd like to fuck you if you weren't so ugly." The next day she summons him and confronts him about this comment, sitting on the porch of her father's house, while, in typical Munro detail, she cleans eggs with a piece of steel wool. Suddenly, momentously, they run away together, marry, have three children and 'five times as many lovers', grow old together. His comment is never explained. But it has been the galvanizing force for the subsequent course of Rhea's life. It connects with the subtle sexual unease, an unspoken misogyny at the bootlegger's house, and in her sessions parked in the car with Billy Doud. It creates "the clear space in her head with the light buzz around it" that she experiences on the porch as she cleans eggs. And this, imagistically, connects with the empty space of the old fair-grounds in the river flats, where that very same night, a neighbour Eunie Morgan was taken to a luminous spaceship, and her life too was forever changed.

Moments of insight, glimpses of a more stringent, unknowable reality, have always been hallmarks of Alice Munro's fiction. But in Open Secrets, this reality is drawn in as a player, is enacted in the narrative itself.

It is a mature vision. Alice Munro is in her sixties now, and sometimes in the sense of risk, of ease, of playfulness, of mischievous disregard for the conventions, these stories reminded me of the late work of Patrick White, or of Elizabeth Jolley. There is more than a whiff of mortality, a deepening resonance about them, as in all the greatest short stories. I would rate Open Secrets as the best, so far, of her later work as I rate Lives of Girls and Women the best of the early work and The Moons of Jupiter of the middle period. Harold Bloom elects her to the canon with Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You.

Is she still writing the story we want to hear? It is always difficult to judge the contemporary climate, but ours, I think, is or has been an intellectual era in literary endeavour, both in its writing and reception. There is a consciousness of finding a position. Its origin may be emotional but its location, its field of reference, is intellectual. It has yielded some bright treasures and broken some complacent patterns, but in fiction, especially the short story, it's a little as if, in John Updike's phrase, we 'hug the shore', don't quite trust where the open sea will take us. Alice Munro reminds us that there is such a thing as thinking fictionally, in which the focus, the ultimately cold eye of the writer's imagination holds so closely to the given, to the particularity of character, to 'the thing in itself' that its revelation resists self-consciousness, resists orthodoxy, and resides in the experience of the lives she has so deeply explored. And at this stage in her career, in the last years of the twentieth century, the accumulation of experience, story after story, is almost cosmic in its vision.

It can be harder, I think, to read a collection of short stories than a longer form. So many beginnings and endings. One life after another at its moment of intensity. So many little worlds set up which then have to justify their own meaning and sense of closure. Not subject to an overriding narrative project, the short story arises from a very direct response to experience. Its intensity can only be sustained by feeling. Above all, it cannot afford complacency, staleness, or the blunting of feeling.

Alice Munro continues to write stories of formidable urgency and integrity. She does it every time. She does it again and again.