The Love of a Good Woman
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In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes - the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met - the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her - she must count on herself.
Some choices are made - in a will, in a decision to leave home - with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted; when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences.
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Alice Munro might not think of herself as a feminist author (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro), but she sure reads like one, in the best possible way. I also sometimes struggle with collections of short stories - if a novel's theme is like hitting a big gong and letting the reverberations ripple out into the air over the course of the book, sometimes a collection of short stories feels to me like someone keeps hitting a smaller gong over and over again. I did not have this struggle with Munro, despite my previous experience of her being restricted to single stories at a time in The New Yorker. I don't think I could ever get tired of what she has to say, and the thematic consistencies across her stories feel like meaningfully different variations on answers to her larger questions.
