and urge him to give himself up. The way she decides to do this, however, creates the open-ended ambiguity of the story: She asks him to row her out on the river, where she will tell him what she knows, also informing him that she cannot swim. At the last minute, she changes her mind, but cannot get out of the situation. The story ends just before they leave the shore, so the reader does not know whether she confronts him or not, and if she does, whether he pushes her in the river or rows them both back to the shore.

“The Love of a Good Woman” begins like a novel, but instead of continuing to broaden out as it introduces new characters and seemingly new stories, it tightens up, slowly connecting what at first seemed disparate and unrelated. It is a classic example of Munro’s characteristic technique of creating a world that has all the illusion of external reality while all the time pulling the reader deeper into what becomes a hallucinatory inner world of mystery, secrecy, and deception. Unlike a novel, which would be bound to develop some sort of satisfying closure, Munro’s story reaches a moral impasse, an ambiguous open end in which the reader suddenly realizes that instead of living in the world of apparent reality, he or she has been whirled, as if by a centrifugal force, to an almost unbearable central point of intensity.

Munro also returns to other favorite themes: infidelity, separation, divorce. “The Children Stay,” the third- prize winner in the 1998 O. Henry Awards competition seems, on the one hand, a conventional eternal triangle story, with the central female character leaving her husband and family for another man. However, Munro complicates this predictable story line by making the woman an amateur actress and the man she runs away with the director of a local theater company’s production of the play Eurydice. Munro has said that the story is about the way people make choices and how those choices are not usually about the things people think they are. The story explores the young woman’s irrational decision to leave a husband and family for whom she cares, not for love or sex but for some romantic and compulsive obsession that she cannot quite control. Classical allusions to Orpheus, whose seductive music is not to be resisted, underlie the story’s structure. “The Children Stay” is a variation of the romance story, practiced so well by Edna O’Brien, in which a woman cannot resist following a romantic image, even as she knows that it bears little relationship to reality.

“Jakarta” also centers on this theme. Focusing on two couples during the 1960’s, when wife-swapping and open marriages were in fashion, the story ponders the disappearance of one of the husbands, Cottar, on a trip to Jakarta. However, thirty years later, when the other husband, Kent, along with his new wife, goes to visit the wife of the missing man, they both articulate their suspicion that Cottar ran away with Kath, Kent’s first wife. Like “The Children Stay,” the story is about how people try to find a way to snap themselves apart from a life decision to which they refuse to reconcile themselves. However, as is typical with Munro, this story never suggests that either path taken is the one that will assure happiness.

The most curious story in the collection is “My Mother’s Dream,” which is ostensibly told by a baby who is born just after her father has been killed in World War II. Although the story is told by the woman the baby becomes, the point of view is presented as if the baby were making conscious decisions, the main one of which is to reject the mother and prefer instead the father’s mentally unstable sister, Iona. Particularly difficult for the mother is the fact that the baby cannot tolerate her playing the violin, one of the activities that gives her life some meaning. On one crucial day, when the mother must care for the inconsolable baby alone, she gives it a few grains of a sedative and takes the rest herself and falls asleep. When Iona comes home, she is terrified that the mother has smothered the baby. After this climactic day, in an almost allegorical way, the baby becomes more receptive to the mother, Iona’s mental illness lessens, and the mother returns to her violin as a professional musician.

“Before the Change” is the closest thing to a social message story in the collection. The title refers to, among other things, a change in Canadian abortion law. Presented as a long letter from a young woman to a theology professor who has gotten her pregnant, the story focuses on the woman’s relationship with her doctor father, who performs illegal abortions in his home office with the help of an older woman. The most important single event in the story occurs when the old woman cannot be present and the daughter must help her father with an abortion. When she tells him about her own pregnancy and how her lover would not marry her while she was pregnant for fear of losing his job and his reputation in the community, the father has a stroke. The story ends with the girl’s realization that, in spite of a thriving regular practice, her father has left her very little; she suspects the old woman has been blackmailing him. Although the story, like many other Munro fictions, focuses on some ambiguous secret, its emphasis on the abortion issue makes it more polemical and less mysterious than the best of Munro’s short fictions. As leisurely as Munro’s stories are, the short-story form cannot easily bear the weight of polemical rhetoric and social lesson without seeming awkwardly and obviously rigged.

“Rich as Stink” centers on Karen, an eleven-year- old, whose divorced mother is helping a self-important historian do research on a book on the explorer Sieur de La Salle. The conflict of the story is based on the mother’s affair with the man and the effect this has on the young girl, particularly because of his paternalistic control over the child. The story comes to a frightening climax when Karen, wearing the man’s wife’s wedding dress as a joke, drags the lace train through a candle and is badly burned. The burn, like the young girl’s realization of her father’s secret blackmail in “After the Change,” is not a source of anger and resentment, however, but rather a sign of liberation from old ghosts and male control.

“Cortes Island” centers on a young woman nicknamed “Little Bride,” who lives with her new husband in the basement apartment of Mrs. Gorrie and her invalid husband. At the request of Mrs. Gorrie, the young woman cares for the husband, until one day he tells her, by means of his scrapbook, a story about Cortes Island in which a man dies in a fire and leaves his seven-year-old son an orphan. The story somehow liberates the young woman, and she gets a job in a library and begins to devote time to her own writing. However, at the end of the story, when she and her husband move to a new place, she dreams erotic dreams of Mr. Gorrie and is obsessed with images of the burned house.

The central event of “Save the Reaper,” another mother/daughter story, focuses on a woman who is taking her two grandchildren on a drive in the country. While playing a game called “Aliens,” in which the children pretend that the driver of another car is from another planet, the grandmother, seeming to recognize some scene from her childhood, follows a car to a rural house in which a group of half-dressed men are playing cards and drinking. If the men are reminiscent of William Faulkner’s Snopes family, the grandmother’s mistake is an obvious borrowing from the famous story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Munro’s acknowledged mentor, Flannery O’Connor. After a few tense minutes in the house, the grandmother leaves, only to be flagged down by a young girl who has been living there and who wants a ride away from the place. Again there are tense moments, then a second escape when the girl gets out, but not before the grandmother tells her that she can come and stay with her if she finds no other place that night. The final lingering fear that something dangerous may be waiting is a typical theme of modern American short fiction from Flannery O’Connor to Raymond Carver.

Although in the last thirty years the short story has been characterized first by experimentation and then by attenuation, Alice Munro has continued to go her own way, so confident of the nature of the short story and her control of the form that she needs to observe no trends nor imitate any precursors. Certainly she does not write in a vacuum—she is clearly aware of short- story masters who have preceded her, including O’Connor and Anton Chekhov—but Munro has found her own unique rhythm and controls it consummately. Although there is always something mysterious and unspeakable in her stories, there is never the cryptic compression of much late twentieth century short fiction. In an almost novelistic fashion, as if she had all the time in the world, Munro lovingly lingers on her characters and seldom misses the opportunity to register an arresting image. Yet a Munro story is deceptive; it lulls the reader into a false sense of security in which time seems to stretch comfortably out like everyday reality, only to suddenly turn and tighten so intensely that the reader is left breathless.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCV, September 1, 1998, p. 6.

The Canadian Forum. LXXVII, October, 1998, p. 49.

Library Journal. CXXIII, September 15, 1998, p. 115.

Maclean’s. CXI, November 16, 1998, p. 82.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, November 1, 1998, p. 6.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, September 7, 1998, p. 81.

Time. CLII, November 30, 1998, p. 119.

The Times Literary Supplement. December 4, 1998, p. 22.

The Wall Street Journal. October 30, 1998, p. W4.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, November 15, 1998, p. 5.

Alice Munro’s narrative technique is typical of the modern short story since Anton Chekhov introduced a new kind of thematic realism at the turn of the twentieth century. “The Love of a Good Woman” is not structured around a chronological series of cause-and-effect events. Instead, it is structured in multiple layers of thematic motifs. The story’s themes of secrets, lies, and flesh are echoed in seemingly trivial, irrelevant details throughout the story. For example, the father of one of the boys who finds Mr. Willens’s body is a heavy smoker who is taken to the hospital with pneumonia. When the nurses wrap him in wet sheets to bring his fever down, the sheets turn brown as he sweats out the tar and nicotine. This is just one minor echo of the story’s pervasive theme of an inner reality or secret being externally manifested. Another boy passes his mother dressing a dummy in a store window and can smell in his mind his mother’s stockings and underwear, thinking that even clean female underwear has a faint private smell both appealing and disgusting.

By describing numerous details that seem irrelevant to the plot of the story but echo its themes, Munro gives her fiction a thematic complexity through repetition that holds the story together. The story does not have the cause-and-effect structure of many novels. In fact, as in most of Munro’s short stories, the nature of cause and effect or motivation—what makes people do what they do—is often left quite mysterious.

“The Love of a Good Woman” is a long story that begins like a novel, but instead of continuing to broaden out, as it introduces new characters and seemingly new stories, it tightens up, slowly connecting what at first seemed disparate and unrelated. It is a classic example of Munro’s most characteristic technique of creating a world that has all the illusion of external reality, while all the time pulling the reader deeper and deeper into what becomes a hallucinatory inner world of mystery, secrecy, and deception. Unlike the novel, which would be bound to develop some sort of satisfying closure, Munro’s story reaches a moral impasse, an ambiguous open end in which the reader suddenly realizes that instead of living in the world of apparent reality, he or she has been whirled to an almost unbearable central point of intensity.

Although there is always something mysterious and unspeakable in Munro’s stories, there is never the cryptic compression of much late twentieth century short fiction. In an almost novelistic fashion, as if she had all the time in the world, Munro lovingly lingers on her characters and seldom misses the opportunity to register an arresting image. However, a Munro story like “The Love of a Good Woman” is deceptive; it lulls the reader into a false sense of security in which time seems to comfortably stretch out like everyday reality, only to suddenly turn and tighten so intensely that the reader is left breathless.