SOURCE: "In Praise of Accidents," in The New Republic, Vol. 202, No. 3930, May 14, 1990, pp. 50-3.

[Salter is an American poet and critic. In the following review, she praises Munro's portrayal of imperfect women in several of the stories from Friend of My Youth, but questions the author's range.]

Choosing a favorite among Alice Munro's stories is no easy task, but for me one of them would be "Accident," from The Moons of Jupiter, her collection published in 1983. Frances is a music teacher at the high school where her married lover, Ted, teaches science. They are groping stark naked in Ted's supply room when the school secretary (who, like most people in the Ontario town of Hanratty, knows about the affair but has politely, up until now, kept that knowledge from the lovers themselves) bangs on the door to tell Ted that his son, Bobby, has died in a car accident.

The lovers soon learn that Bobby has not died—though he will, some hours later—and while they wait in separate places for news, Ted realizes that he has an opportunity to make a superstitious bargain with God: save Bobby, and I'll give up Frances. But Ted, an atheist (or, you might say, a believer in Accident), rejects his own superstition even before Bobby dies, and vows to keep Frances regardless. He even refuses his son a church service, in a selfish rebellion against his wife's family. Nor does he seem terribly sorry for his wife when, in the aftermath of their only son's death, she finally learns about Frances. In fact, in a sudden, cold, thorough upheaval of his life, Ted proposes to Frances, and she accepts—but not before understanding that Ted is not what she hoped he was, and that she never knew much about him or wanted to, apart from sex.

In themselves these events would make quite a story. Instead, cut to thirty years later (a common, but unpredictably varied, Munro device). We are at the funeral of Adelaide, a sadistically pious character who would not be out of place in a Flannery O'Connor story, and who on the day of the accident had asked Frances, as if out of innocent curiosity, whether she thought God was "paying back for" the affair.

Well, Adelaide is now "paid back" for her bad manners and her morbidity, the reader might ungenerously reflect. That's one reason Munro locates us at Adelaide's funeral. Another is to bring Frances back to Hanratty, which she and Ted had left on their marriage, so that she may reencounter the blameless man whose car had been the vehicle, so to speak, of her life's transformation. "If he had not gone out in the snow that day to take a baby carriage across town," Frances thinks (and note the tactfully unelaborated symbol of the baby carriage), she

would not live in Ottawa now, she would not have her two children, she would not have her life, not the same life. That is true. She is sure of it, but it is too ugly to think about. The angle from which she has to see that can never be admitted to; it would seem monstrous.

Here, again, is a chilling potential conclusion to the story. Another writer as skilled and honest and knowing as Munro—and there cannot be many—might well have wrapped it up at this moment. But then a peculiar phrase pops into her character's head:

What difference, thinks Frances. She doesn't know where that thought comes from or what it means, for of course there is a difference, anybody can see that, a life's difference. She's had her love, her scandal, her man, her children …

But it doesn't matter. Not only because she is still "the same Frances," as she uncomfortably realizes, but because people don't matter. For all the intensity of their relations (which Munro conveys early on with the sexy scramble in the supply room), for all the grief a child's death should occasion, and the disgust we may feel in seeing a parent not deepened by that death but merely deflected to another course, people are not terribly distinctive or important; and we all end up, like Bobby and Adelaide, in a casket.

This is a vision of life customarily reserved for poets, with their penchant for looking down on humanity from a great and generalizing height. But in the heart of the best fiction writer, who is more keen on telling stories about people than on displaying narrative or descriptive technique, has to be a belief that people are unique; that a story about Frances in particular, say, is worth telling. What moves and unnerves me each time I look at "Accident" is the simultaneous impression Munro gives that we are all both irreplaceable and dispensable. The story's title in a single word offers a further paradox: every link in the plot's chain derives from the accident, but an accident is, after all, only random.

Another of Munro's most distinguished stories, "Miles City, Montana" (from her 1986 collection The Progress of Love), also concerns the accidental death of a child. The unnamed woman narrator frames her tale with a childhood memory of the drowning of a neglected boy, Steve Gauley. The main story (also a memory) now begins: the narrator, her priggish but somewhat loved husband, Andrew, and their two young daughters, Cynthia and Meg, are on a car trip from Vancouver to Ontario. The mother loves the "shedding" of her domestic life; at home, besieged by neighbors and the telephone, she has wanted "to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was" (and here we might fill in something useful, something respectful toward an otherwise unfulfilled female character, like "graphic design"; but Munro continues) "a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself." We know precisely, are delighted and pained by, what she means: How often does life allow us this wooing?

She goes on:

I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at—a pig on sign, a pony in a field, a Volkswagen on a revolving stand—and pouring lemonade into plastic cups, and all the time these bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper.

In a few pages, it is this mother's very joy in being a watcher, not a keeper that will nearly kill her child. Having stopped to allow the children a swim in a lifeguarded pool (but the lifeguard is kissing her boyfriend at the critical moment), the narrator is absently eyeing a popsicle stick gummed to her heel, philosophizing about the "singleness and precise location" of objects, when it occurs to her: "Where are the children?" Three-year-old Meg, that single, singular object, is located at the bottom of the pool; and by a miracle, she is fished out and returned just in time to life.

But the "accident," in the largest sense, isn't over: these parents will again fail their children. Earlier, the narrator's general account of her marital arguments (which might be continuing to this very day, as far as we knew) had concluded with this all-inclusive, single-sentence, lacerating paragraph: "I haven't seen Andrew for years, don't know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed." And one day, when the children who have so trustingly returned to the back seat of the car achieve some distance from their parents—parents who wanted to believe themselves more attentive than poor Steve Gauley's—they will have to learn to forgive "whatever was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous—all our natural, and particular, mistakes."

Not surprisingly, and yet with unforeseeable twists, more revelations about accidents occur in Munro's new collection, Friend of My Youth. In the marvelously wide and deep "Oh, What Avails," a three-part story spanning decades in the lives of Joan (who will derail a successful marriage for a mostly happy series of affairs) and her brother Morris (who loses the use of an eye at age four, when he steps on a rake), both protagonists are half-blind, agreeable victims of external chance and their own internal limitations.

That's partly the legacy of their cheerful, feckless mother, who never even thought to take the unfortunate boy to an eye specialist: "Couldn't she have gone to the Lions Club and asked them to help her, as they sometimes did help poor people in an emergency? No. No, she couldn't," Munro amusingly offers, by way of something just short of an explanation. Every problem in this beautifully plotted story falls short of solution—a technique suited to carry the mature Joan's intimations of mortality:

[She] is aware of a new danger, a threat that she could not have imagined when she was younger…. And it's hard to describe. The threat is of a change, but it's not the sort of change one has been warned about. It's just this—that suddenly, without warning, Joan is apt to think: Rubble. Rubble. You can look down a street, and you can see the shadows, the light, the brick walls …—you can see all these things in their temporary separateness, all connected underneath in such a troubling, satisfying, necessary, indescribable way. Or you can see rubble. Passing states, a useless variety of passing states. Rubble.

No conscious-seeming "style" adorns these sentences. Indeed, if ever there was a writer whose sentences both ornate and plain are essentially invisible, each a well-washed window through which we may see life as she does, it is Munro. Those who do want to remind themselves of the windowpane of style between writer and reader might consider how that unlovely word "rubble" is repeated enough times that the sound alone acquires an intended meaninglessness.

Munro shouldn't be mistaken for an absurdist, however; the discourse on rubble doesn't end where I have lopped it off. A new paragraph begins with hope, however feeble or possibly ill-fated: "Joan wants to keep this idea of rubble at bay. She pays attention now to all the ways in which people seem to do that." In another story here, "Differently," the randomness and rubble of life are themselves a source of hope for Georgia, who after remembering the marriage she smashed up and the friendship she allowed to die is grateful for a transcendent moment of forgetfulness, an "accidental clarity."

But the most haunting lines in "Differently" appear earlier, where Georgia wonders whether her sons keep pictures of her ex-husband in their homes. "Perhaps they put the pictures away when she comes to visit," she thinks. "Perhaps they think of protecting these images from one who did him hurt." Or, Munro invites us to speculate, they think of shielding the malefactor herself. Protectiveness isn't lavished on the innocent only; we want also to shield the guilty from too piercing a recollection of their crimes. And why? Perhaps as insurance against guilt for our own crimes, committed in the past or waiting in the future. Munro doesn't say; she respects our intelligence, our right to sift on our own the cruel world she shows us.

Cruel and bizarre things do happen in this book, as in all of Munro's collections; and although that staple of modern fiction, sexual betrayal, crops up repeatedly, its power to surprise us is in itself unexpected. Munro's stories often strike us, like life itself, as "stranger than fiction"—that's why we trust them. In the title story, the member of an obscure and punitive religious sect gets his fiancée's sister pregnant and marries her instead; years later he passes over the long-suffering former flancée again to marry another woman—his dead wife's hateful, tarty nurse. In "Five Points," an Eastern European girl, ugly and fat, pays all the boys in town for sex, until she has emptied the till of her parents' store and they are forced in shame and financial ruin to close it. The not particularly passionate wife in "Oranges and Apples," whose cynicism is "automatic and irritating," takes up her worshipful, jealous husband's tacit invitation to sleep with the friend he found spying on her with binoculars.

There's a tonal harshness, too, which we welcome: the immediate revisions and reappraisals by which Munro strips away illusions that she had at first offered us. In "Friend of My Youth," for example—a many-tiered story about deceit, punishment, forgiveness, death, romantic love, and the love of parents and children—the narrator, remembering her mother, writes:

I felt a great fog of platitudes and pieties lurking, an incontestable crippled-mother power, which could capture and choke me. There would be no end to it. I had to keep myself sharp-tongued and cynical, arguing and deflating. Eventually I gave up even that recognition and opposed her in silence.

This is a fancy way of saying that I was no comfort and poor company to her when she had almost nowhere else to turn.

That final sentence is heart-breaking, but it represents, however bitterly, an attempt to laugh. A similar, if lighter, mixture occurs in "Differently," where Georgia's friend has an affair with a man who deserts her in a hotel, after which "she developed frightful chest pains, appropriate to a broken heart. What she really had was a gall-bladder attack." Ever accommodating, her husband comes to take her to the hospital, and then on vacation in Mexico! Or in "Goodness and Mercy," where a daughter escorts her fatally ill mother on a cruise to Europe and then to the hospital in Edinburgh; after all her solicitude, her nearly continuous attendance by land and sea, she is not there when her mother dies but "a couple of blocks away, eating a baked potato from a takeout shop." That the daughter is rather plump, not very much in need of a baked potato, makes the moment more maddening and poignant and, yes, funny.

The recurrence of daughters attached to dying mothers in "Friend of My Youth" and "Goodness and Mercy"—a subject also addressed superbly in the early novel-in-short-story-form The Beggar Maid—raises the interesting question of authorial range. Nearly every major character in this book, as in Munro's others, is a woman; most are adulterers; most are seen over a span of some years; most are perceptive and articulate about their own longings and failings; and every story except for "Friend of My Youth" is recounted in the third person. Such a clustering of similarities is often the sign of a limited writer, and, probably, an autobiographical writer (not necessarily, of course, the same thing).

Yet although Munro strikes me as exactly the sort of person I would care to know, I don't at all have the feeling that I do. Like the machinery of her sentences, she is in some important way admirably invisible. Munro writes of certain attributes—selfishness or carelessness, for example—with the authority of one who has "been there"; but she is remarkably selfless in her presentation of material that may, in this way or that, be autobiographical. And given other similarities among her stories—their rueful but not lugubrious tone, the acute sense her characters suffer of the ineffability of life's lessons—the mutations Munro achieves in characterization and plotting are even more impressive. Finally, though, it is the largeness of Munro's wisdom that confirms her range. When, at the end of the intricately designed mansion of a story "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," Munro's woman protagonist wonders, "Meanwhile, what makes a man happy?" and can only speculate, "It must be something quite different," this is no abdication of authorial responsibility; it is a door boldly opened into another room.

One of the things we discover in that mysterious annex that Munro opens up, in story after story, is that all of us have been telling stories too. Many of Munro's characters (novelists, poets, actors, editors, teachers, journalists) are themselves employed as makers or interpreters of tales, but so is the housewife in "Miles City, Montana" who sees the "wooing of distant parts" of herself as her "real work." When she hopes that "the essential composition would be achieved," she is speaking of her life; but Munro is also speaking through her of the composition of this story, whose self-reflexiveness reminds us that we can never leave ourselves out of any truth, or truths, we apprehend. Munro is not merely rehashing the fiction writer's commonplace that all points of view are subjective and relative; she is giving us credit for attempting, nonetheless, now and then, an impossible overview of our lives.

A rage to consider everything simultaneously—not just the "distant parts" of the self but of other selves and, indeed, of a universe of objective fact—is the frustrated, mystical longing at the heart of nearly every story Munro has written. The "distant" is conceived not only in space but in time—hence those perspectives, clairvoyantly convincing, that Munro gives us of thirty years after, twenty years before. The short story has rarely been used (successfully) for so long-reaching a purpose. "Too many things," as the creative writing instructor in "Differently" chides his student; "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."

Good advice, perhaps, to the writer of average talents, but it would not interest Almeda Joynt Roth, the nineteenth-century poet Munro invents in the most ambitious story in this volume, "Meneseteung." In a sort of grand, clearheaded delirium, and one of the most inspired moments in any of these extraordinary stories, Almeda demands of herself a God-like vision, a fusion of poetry's timeless themes and fiction's time-specific, place-specific raggedness:

Isn't that the idea—one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems, the poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags? Stars and flowers and birds and trees and angels in the snow and dead children at twilight—that is not the half of it. You have to get in the obscene racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of Jarvis Poulter's boot and the plucked-chicken haunch with its blue-black flower …

Alice Munro knows that you must get all of that in—the bits and pieces of accident flying together into the deliberate whole of art—and once again, in Friend of My Youth, she has done it.