I don’t have the dust jacket for this book at present, but I read a summary of it online, and the conclusions that others have drawn about these stories, the certainties about things left unsaid, made me feel like I did when I was a child, when in the movies an actor and actress would embrace and the screen would go dark. I know now, as an adult, that it meant they were having sex in whatever magical land existed off-camera, but as a child I had no idea, and so missed several rather important plot points. Reading those other peoples’ impressions I felt like I had misunderstood when things faded to black.
Reflection makes me think that perhaps I didn’t misunderstand. Quite a bit occurs in the unstated moments of Munro’s short fiction. What she leaves out is as important as what she describes, but I don’t get the sense that she intends there to be no mystery in her work, no unanswered questions. Her work feels so much like life, or rather I recognize in it a true picture of the messiness and vitality and complications of genuine lives, genuinely lived, that I feel such unwavering certainty would be anathema to her work. I like that I have questions, that some of the edges of these characters’ lives are left fuzzy, that I have to fill in answers and potentialities (sometimes several) for myself. I feel like my reading experience was richer for it.
As with Who Do You Think You Are?, this book was a complete joy to read. One of the talents of a great short story writer is to create characters who are as alive and intense in the space of fifty pages—or even ten—as those of their brother and sister novelists, who take hundreds. Alice Munro never fails in this regard. In fact I think most of the time she outdoes her novelist counterparts, and it is for that reason (and you could say many other reasons as well) that she is a master of the form (I know the correct honorific here would be mistress, but what male of my generation can use that word comfortably in reference to anyone who is not taking part in either adultery or bondage? I know of none).
The Love of a Good Woman was my sixth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay.
