Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

By YVONNE VAN DONGEN

On offering from the pen of Canadian writer Alice Munro is always an event worth treasuring, even more so knowing that Munro turned 70 this year and cannot continue to produce such fine short fiction forever.

This collection is classic Munro, the pure and subtle voice, the brilliantly executed stories read as much for craft as for plot, and the intensely personal and regional focus which nevertheless resonates with women everywhere. Munro's ear is so true and her characters so painfully authentic that you feel there must be more than an element of autobiography to her work.

It's fair to say that in this 10th collection of short stories Munro doesn't mine any new ground. She continues to be preoccupied by the lives and loves of girls and women, the extraordinariness of ordinary lives and the changes thrust upon the sexes.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this book, also evident in her previous work The Love of a Good Woman (2000), is the strong retrospective element.

Characters review their lives at a pivotal revelatory moment, perhaps wondering about the road not taken or examining anew fantasies nurtured over years. Three of the stories are concerned with death and dying while another centres on a husband who has to put his wife in a rest-home.

Of course as with all Munro's stories, they cannot be reduced to a simple plot-line or meaning. Her works open out, up and down and sideways, with each strand, event or what seems like minor characters given equal weight.

Points of view shift and change so that a story like Post and Beam, which begins with Lionel, a lonely rather damaged young man who is welcomed into a family, ends with Polly, an unwelcome relative who also attaches herself to the same family.

Munro is not unkind but there is a dry-eyed precision and anti-romanticism to her writing which can seem cool and calculating.

Reading the book in one sitting can be slightly unnerving, and there are times when you yearn for just a little more heart and soul.

As if in explanation Munro presents us with the story Family Furnishings which, among other things, examines the ruthlessness of the writer who uses private information as raw material for her art.

At the same time as the narrator unashamedly justifies the literary betrayal of friends and family, Munro skilfully undercuts this self-assured pose.

As it turns out, the clever writer was blind to the biggest and most shocking family story of all while the person portrayed so cruelly knows the writer better than she realises. "[Alfrida] said you were smart, but you weren't ever quite as smart as you thought you were". It's a nice touch, one which punctures the smug, condescending omniscient pretence of the narrator.

But if Munro is warning us about placing too much faith in her and obliquely pointing out her limitations, she's wasting her time. We already know that's not true.

Random House

$49.95

* Yvonne van Dongen is an Auckland journalist.