Reading ““Selected Stories,’’ one finds one’s respect for Munro growing by the page. Many of them, the last half dozen in particular, are worthy of Eudora Welty or Peter Taylor. In other words, they are as good as stories get. Set mostly in small towns in the author’s native Canada, they record what we casually think of as the everyday actions of normal people. But Munro has an unerring talent for uncov- ering the extraordinary in the ordinary. ““Royal Beatings’’ conjures up the house of Atreus when a father whips his daughter. In ““Fits,’’ a woman’s suicide unsettles the equilibrium of a whole town.
Strange as these stories seem, they are always accessible. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford says, ““One could suppose that she’d easily be just a “writer’s writer’: arty, lapidary, secret-keeping. But no. She manages to make the best of literature and literary impulse irresistible to a general readership.''
Munro could be a character in one of her own stories. The daughter of a former schoolteacher and a farmer who raised foxes and turkeys, the 65-year-old author grew up in a small Ontario town, only a few miles from the town where she now lives with her second husband, a retired geographer. ““I’ve had the ordinary life of a woman of my generation,’’ said Munro, who has three grown daughters, ““housework, kids and all that. I’m not a very radical sort of person.’’ The bourgeois life was a conscious choice: ““If you live an interesting life you probably don’t have much time to write.''
The uneventfulness of her outward circumstances belies the intensity of her interior life. ““I would have given up anything to be a writer when I was a teenager,’’ she said, tucking into a plate of mussels. ““I’d have given up boyfriends. I’d have given up the whole of ordinary life to make this other world.’’ As a youth, she read everything she’d ““ever heard of that had a reputation,’’ but it was Eudora Welty’s stories in ““The Golden Apples’’ that set her course. ““There was some transcendent importance that it gave to life,’’ she said. ““I was crazy about that book, crazy to do that.''
When I quoted one reviewer, who called her stories ““gossip informed by genius,’’ she put her fork down and said, ““I love that. I read People magazine not just at the checkout stand, I sometimes buy it. Gossip is a very central part of my life. I’m interested in small-town gossip. Gossip has that feeling in it, that one wants to know about life.''
That sense of wanting to know is particularly acute in the later stories, which are as dense and eventful as most novels. In ““Carried Away,’’ one of her greatest stories, a small-town librarian is jilted by a soldier returning from World War I, who is later decapitated in an industrial accident. The woman marries the town tycoon. Years later, a widow, she is visited by the ghost of her dead lover. Everyone in this story is consumed by a thirst for certainty, and this unslakable desire drives each of the characters further into the mysteriousness of life. Near the end of the tale, after the woman, now old, has encountered the ghost, she realizes that ““it was anarchy she was up against–a devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations.’’ The story finishes by circling back to the day the woman first arrived in town. ““She had never been here when the leaves were on the trees. It must make a great difference. So much that lay open now would be concealed.’’ The beauty of this image and the bleakness of its meaning hang suspended in perfect balance.
As the plates were cleared away, Munro tried and failed to imagine an existence without writing. ““What I wonder is, what takes its place? I can’t go on a trip or look at a tree without wanting to weave that into this other world that I can make,’’ she said. ““I can’t imagine not doing it.’’ Neither can her fans, whose gratitude for what she’s given them is exceeded only by their craving for what might come next. That sounds greedy, but when a writer this great just keeps getting better, what else can you do?
