In the world of Alice Munro, the best route is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points. In her ninth superlative collection of short fiction, The Love of a Good Woman, the setting is once again western Canada, and the subject matter is classic Munro: secrets, love, betrayal, and the stuff of ordinary lives. But as is usual for this master of the short form, the path she takes is anything but ordinary. The stunning title story is a case in point. A narrative in four parts, it begins with the drowning of a small-town optometrist and ripples outward, touching first the boys who find the body, then a spiteful dying woman and her young practical nurse. Whose tale is this, anyway? Not the optometrist's, surely, though his death holds it together. The effect is not exactly Rashomon-like either, though each of the sections views him through a different eye. Instead, "The Love of a Good Woman" is as thorough and inclusive a portrait of small-town life as can be imagined--its tensions and its deceit, its involuntary bonds. Within its 75 pages it encompasses a world more capacious than that of most novels.

As always, Munro's prose is both simple and moving, as when the letter-writing protagonist of "Before the Change" sends her love to an ex-fiancé: What if people really did that--sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey's eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open. The fictions in this volume burn with a kind of dry-eyed anti-romanticism--even the ones whose plots verge on domestic melodrama (a baby's near-death in "My Mother's Dream"; an adulterous wife in "The Children Stay"). Densely populated, elliptical in construction, each story circles around its principal events and relationships like planets around a sun. The result is layered and complex, its patterns not always apparent on first reading: in other words, something like life. --Mary Park


From Publishers Weekly
Again mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial Canadian life, Munro shines in her ninth collection, peopled with characters whose sin is the original one: to have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The good woman of the title story?a practical nurse who has already sacrificed her happiness to keep a deathbed promise?must choose whether to believe another moribund patient's confession or to ignore it and seize a second chance at the life she has missed. The drama of deathbed revelation is acted out, again, between a dying man and the woman at his bedside in "Cortes Island," when a stroke victim exposes his deepest secret to his part-time caretaker, in what may be the last act of intimacy left to him, and in the process puts his finger on the fault lines in her marriage. In the extraordinary "Before the Change," a young woman confronts her father with the open secret of his life and reveals the hidden facts of hers; she is unprepared, however, for the final irony of his legacy. The powerful closing story, "My Mother's Dream," is about a secret in the making, showing how a young mother almost kills her baby and how that near fatality, revealed at last to the daughter when she is 50, binds mother and daughter. Compressing the arc of a novella, Munro's long, spare stories?there are eight here? span decades and lay bare not only the strata of the solitary life but also the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind together even the loneliest of individuals. First serial to the New Yorker. (Nov.) FYI: Four of Munro's previous collections are available in Vintage paperback.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In the title story, set in the early spring of 1951, three young boys on a lark make a grim discovery?the drowned body of the town optometrist. Their secret knowledge gives them a sense of purpose and self-importance. But this secret pales beside the darker one that emerges late in the story of how the man came to die. In "Before the Change," a woman recovering from the breakup of her engagement to a theology student is filled with conflicting emotions on a visit home with her father, the town abortionist. In the closing story, "My Mother's Dream," the pregnant widow of a World War II pilot is left to cope with his dotty family. In their home on her own with an irritable baby on an impossibly hot, pre-air-conditioning day, she is forced to close all the windows lest the neighbors assume she is an unfit mother. Munro's stories are always afforded the luxury of space and the weight of detail. Like carefully preserved home movies, they capture moments of the past that are at once intensely recognizable and profoundly revealing. These exquisite stories, some never before published, are highly recommended.-?Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Michael Gorra
...her stories never feel autobiographical. And yet nothing here looks like a performance, either, a voice put on or ventriloquized.


The Washington Post Book World, Greg Varner
Munro is indisputably a master. The Love of a Good Woman describes human existence with greater elegance and precision than she has previously achieved in her distinguished body of work. With magical economy, she sketches the contours of a life or a complex relationship, but it's a finely detailed portrait--with subtle shading and deep perspective--rather than a mere suggestion.


From AudioFile
An oculist's probes, described in the first of Alice Munro's stories, remind us that behind even the clearest surfaces, secrets lay waiting to be examined. Paula Parker has a luscious voice, and every syllable is clear without sounding labored. However, listeners who prefer a subtler reading may find Parker's expressiveness distracting. The narration and characters are vividly voiced, sounding more colorful and dramatic than they might appear on the page. There are also some technical problems the producers could have solved: Scattered episodes of mouth noise and erratic tempos might have been eliminated, and a table of contents or list of story titles should appear on the box, if not on the individual cassettes. S.P. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
To read Munro's stories is to enter dense woods at the height of summer, so rich are they in spiky detail, shifting patterns of light and shadow, rustlings of unseen beings, and fecund smells, but the path is easily found, and it leads to wondrous sights and surprising disclosures. It is a tribute to Munro's virtuosity and vitality that a collection of stories as rich, varied, and substantial as this one has appeared so soon after publication of her capacious Selected Stories (1996). Here, as is her wont, Munro packs each paragraph with a wealth of significant details, articulates the thoughts of a wide array of curious characters, and captures the mixed signals embedded in exchanges between women friends, husbands and wives, or children and parents. In the riveting title story, a timeless tale set in Munro-country, that is, a small town along the Canada shore of Lake Huron, Munro tells a complex story about three boys who discover a drowned optometrist and the nurse who cares for the woman who inadvertently caused his death. In "Jakarta," a woman who has dutifully married and had her first child finds herself attracted to and upset by an American acquaintance whose life seems much freer and more passionate. Each story has a distinct mood and movement as Munro roams across the Canadian and American border over the course of the last few decades, discerning exactly what is most poignant about each place, each time frame, and each heart. Donna Seaman


Review
Superb...Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers 'for grown-up people.' The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.--Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review

A writer for the ages--Dan Cryer, Newsday

Alice Munro is indisputably a master. Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception...Her imagination is fearless...A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.--Greg Varner, Washington Post Book World

A riveting collection...a lovely book. Munro's stories move through the years with a sneaky grace.--Georgia Jones-Davis, San Francisco Chronicle

A triumph...certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov--Carol Shields, Mirabella

Superlative...She distills a novel's worth of dramatic events into a story of 20 pages.--Erik Huber, Time OutM

These astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform.--Francine Prose, Elle


From the Hardcover edition.


Review
Superb...Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers 'for grown-up people.' The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.--Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review

A writer for the ages--Dan Cryer, Newsday

Alice Munro is indisputably a master. Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception...Her imagination is fearless...A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.--Greg Varner, Washington Post Book World

A riveting collection...a lovely book. Munro's stories move through the years with a sneaky grace.--Georgia Jones-Davis, San Francisco Chronicle

A triumph...certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov--Carol Shields, Mirabella

Superlative...She distills a novel's worth of dramatic events into a story of 20 pages.--Erik Huber, Time OutM

These astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform.--Francine Prose, Elle


From the Hardcover edition.


Book Description
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. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.


From the Publisher
Superb...Long ago, Virginia Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers 'for grown-up people.' The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.--Michael Gorra, New York Times Book ReviewA writer for the ages--Dan Cryer, NewsdayAlice Munro is indisputably a master. Like all great writers, she helps sharpen perception...Her imagination is fearless...A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.--Greg Varner, Washington Post Book WorldA riveting collection...a lovely book. Munro's stories move through the years with a sneaky grace.--Georgia Jones-Davis, San Francisco ChronicleA triumph...certain to seal her reputation as our contemporary Chekhov--Carol Shields, MirabellaSuperlative...She distills a novel's worth of dramatic events into a story of 20 pages.--Erik Huber, Time OutMThese astonishing stories remind us, yet again, of the literary miracles Alice Munro continues to perform.--Francine Prose, Elle


From the Inside Flap
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. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.


About the Author
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eight previous collections of stories--Dance of the Happy Shades, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, The Beggar Maid, The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, and her Selected Stories--as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women.

During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three Governor General's Literary Awards: Canada's highest; the Lannan Literary Award; and the W. H. Smith Award, given to Open Secrets as the best book published in the United Kingdom in 1995. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.

Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind  some large logs. They have chosen this not only for shelter from the  occasional sharp wind--they've got Kath's baby with them--but  because they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use  the beach every day. They call these women the Monicas.

The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece. They  are all under the leadership of the real Monica, who walked down  the beach and introduced herself when she first spotted Kath and  Sonje and the baby. She invited them to join the gang.

They followed her, lugging the carry-cot between them. What  else could they do? But since then they lurk behind the logs.

The Monicas' encampment is made up of beach umbrellas,  towels, diaper bags, picnic hampers, inflatable rafts and whales,  toys, lotions, extra clothing, sun hats, Thermos bottles of coffee,  paper cups and plates, and Thermos tubs in which they carry  homemade fruit-juice Popsicles.

They are either frankly pregnant or look as if they might  be pregnant, because they have lost their figures. They  trudge down to the water's edge, hollering out the  names of their children who are riding and falling off logs or the  inflatable whales.

"Where's your hat? Where's your ball? You've been on that  thing long enough now, let Sandy have a turn."

Even when they talk to each other their voices have to be raised  high, over the shouts and squalls of their children.

"You can get ground round as cheap as hamburger if you go to  Woodward's."

"I tried zinc ointment but it didn't work."

"Now he's got an abscess in the groin."

"You can't use baking powder, you have to use soda."

These women aren't so much older than Kath and Sonje. But  they've reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn  the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out  progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate the  bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus  trees, the cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath  feels their threat particularly, since she's a mother now herself.  When she nurses her baby she often reads a book, sometimes  smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a sludge of animal  function. And she's nursing so that she can shrink her uterus and  flatten her stomach, not just provide the baby--Noelle--with  precious maternal antibodies.

Kath and Sonje have their own Thermos of coffee and their  extra towels, with which they've rigged up a shelter for Noelle.  They have their cigarettes and their books. Sonje has a book  by Howard Fast. Her husband has told her that if she has to read  fiction that's who she should be reading. Kath is reading the short  stories of Katherine Mansfield and the short stories of D. H. Lawrence.  Sonje has got into the habit of putting down her own book and picking  up whichever book of Kath's that Kath is not reading at the moment.  She limits herself to one story and then goes back to Howard Fast.

When they get hungry one of them makes the trek up a long  flight of wooden steps. Houses ring this cove, up on the rocks  under the pine and cedar trees. They are all former summer  cottages, from the days before the Lions Gate Bridge was built,  when people from Vancouver would come across the water for  their vacations. Some cottages--like Kath's and Sonje's--are still  quite primitive and cheap to rent. Others, like the real Monica's,  are much improved. But nobody intends to stay here; everybody's  planning to move on to a proper house. Except for Sonje and her  husband, whose plans seem more mysterious than anybody else's.

There is an unpaved crescent road serving the houses, and  joined at either end to Marine Drive. The enclosed semicircle is full  of tall trees and an undergrowth of ferns and salmonberry bushes,  and various intersecting paths, by which you can take a shortcut  out to the store on Marine Drive. At the store Kath and Sonje will  buy takeout French fries for lunch. More often it's Kath who  makes this expedition, because it's a treat for her to walk under the  trees--something she can't do anymore with the baby carriage.  When she first came here to live, before Noelle was born, she  would cut through the trees nearly every day, never thinking of her  freedom. One day she met Sonje. They had both worked at the  Vancouver Public Library a little while before this, though they had  not been in the same department and had never talked to each  other. Kath had quit in the sixth month of pregnancy as you were  required to do, lest the sight of you should disturb the patrons, and  Sonje had quit because of a scandal.

Or, at least, because of a story that had got into the newspapers.  Her husband, Cottar, who was a journalist working for a magazine  that Kath had never heard of, had made a trip to Red China.  He was referred to in the paper as a left-wing writer. Sonje's picture  appeared beside his, along with the information that she worked in the library. There was concern that in her job she might be promoting  Communist books and influencing children who used the library, so  that they might become Communists. Nobody said that she had done  this--just that it was a danger. Nor was it against the law for somebody  from Canada to visit China. But it turned out that Cottar and Sonje were  both Americans, which made their behavior more alarming, perhaps  more purposeful.

"I know that girl," Kath had said to her husband, Kent, when  she saw Sonje's picture. "At least I know her to see her. She  always seems kind of shy. She'll be embarrassed about this."

"No she won't," said Kent. "Those types love to feel  persecuted, it's what they live for."

The head librarian was reported as saying that Sonje had  nothing to do with choosing books or influencing young  people--she spent most of her time typing out lists.

"Which was funny," Sonje said to Kath, after they had  recognized each other, and spoken and spent about half an hour  talking on the path. The funny thing was that she did not know how  to type.

She wasn't fired, but she had quit anyway. She thought she  might as well, because she and Cottar had some changes  coming up in their future.

Kath wondered if one change might be a baby. It seemed to her  that life went on, after you finished school, as a series of further  examinations to be passed. The first one was getting married. If  you hadn't done that by the time you were twenty-five, that  examination had to all intents and purposes been failed. (She  always signed her name "Mrs. Kent Mayberry" with a sense of  relief and mild elation.) Then you thought about having the first  baby. Waiting a year before you got pregnant was a good idea.  Waiting two years was a little more prudent than necessary. And  three years started people wondering. Then down the road  somewhere was the second baby. After that the progression got  dimmer and it was hard to be sure just when you had arrived at  wherever it was you were going.


Sonje was not the sort of friend who would tell you that she was trying to have a baby and how long she'd been trying and what techniques she was using. She never talked about sex in that way, or about her periods or any behavior of her body--though she soon told Kath things that most people would consider much more shocking. She had a graceful dignity--she had wanted to be a ballet dancer until she got too tall, and she didn't stop regretting that until she met Cottar, who said, "Oh, another little bourgeois girl hoping she'll turn into a dying swan." Her face was broad, calm, pink skinned--she never wore any makeup, Cottar was against makeup--and her thick fair hair was pinned up in a bushy chignon. Kath thought she was wonderful looking--both seraphic and intelligent.

Eating their French fries on the beach, Kath and Sonje discuss characters in the stories they've been reading. How is it that no woman could love Stanley Burnell? What is it about Stanley? He is such a boy, with his pushy love, his greed at the table, his self-satisfaction. Whereas Jonathan Trout--oh, Stanley's wife, Linda, should have married Jonathan Trout, Jonathan who glided through the water while Stanley splashed and snorted. "Greetings, my celestial peach blossom," says Jonathan in his velvety bass voice. He is full of irony, he is subtle and weary. "The shortness of life, the shortness of life," he says. And Stanley's brash world crumbles, discredited.

Something bothers Kath. She can't mention it or think about it. Is Kent something like Stanley?

One day they have an argument. Kath and Sonje have an unexpected and disturbing argument about a story by D. H. Lawrence. The story is called "The Fox."

At the end of that story the lovers--a soldier and a woman named March--are sitting on the sea cliffs looking out on the Atlantic, towards their future home in Canada. They are going to leave England, to start a new life. They are committed to each other, but they are not truly happy. Not yet.

The soldier knows that they will not be truly happy until the woman gives her life over to him, in a way that she has not done so far. March is still struggling against him, to hold herself separate from him, she is making them both obscurely miserable by her efforts to hang on to her woman's soul, her woman's mind. She must stop this--she must stop thinking and stop wanting and let her consciousness go under, until it is submerged in his. Like the reeds that wave below the surface of the water. Look down, look down--see how the reeds wave in the water, they are alive but they never break the surface. And that is how her female nature must live within his male nature. Then she will be happy and he will be strong and content. Then they will have achieved a true marriage.

Kath says that she thinks this is stupid.

She begins to make her case. "He's talking about sex, right?"

"Not just," says Sonje. "About their whole life."

"Yes, but sex. Sex leads to getting pregnant. I mean in the normal course of events. So March has a baby. She probably has more than one. And she has to look after them. How can you do that if your mind is waving around under the surface of the sea?"

"That's taking it very literally," says Sonje in a slightly superior tone.

"You can either have thoughts and make decisions or you can't," says Kath. "For instance--the baby is going to pick up a razor blade. What do you do? Do you just say, Oh, I think I'll just float around here till my husband comes home and he can make up his mind, that is our mind, about whether this is a good idea?"

Sonje said, "That's taking it to extremes."

Each of their voices has hardened. Kath is brisk and scornful, Sonje grave and stubborn.

"Lawrence didn't want to have children," Kath says. "He was jealous of the ones Frieda had from being married before."

Sonje is looking down between her knees, letting sand fall through her fingers. "I just think it would be beautiful," she says. "I think it would be beautiful, if a woman could."

Kath knows that something has gone wrong. Something is wrong with her own argument. Why is she so angry and excited? And why did she shift over to talking about babies, about children? Because she has a baby and Sonje doesn't? Did she say that about Lawrence and Frieda because she suspects that it is partly the same story with Cottar and Sonje?

When you make the argument on the basis of the children, about the woman having to look after the children, you're in the clear. You can't be blamed. But when Kath does that she is covering up. She can't stand that part about the reeds and the water, she feels bloated and suffocated with incoherent protest. So it is herself she is thinking of, not of any children. She herself is the very woman that Lawrence is railing about. And she can't reveal that straight out because it might make Sonje suspect--it might make Kath herself suspect--an impoverishment in Kath's life.

Sonje who has said, during another alarming conversation, "My happiness depends on Cottar."

My happiness depends on Cottar.

That statement shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn't want it to be true of herself.

But she didn't want Sonje to think that she was a woman who had missed out on love. Who had not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

New Yorker

Munro's austere and magisterial stories of lust and loss are, if anything, more enigmatic than ever, and yet their opacity occasionally gestures toward something akin to hope.

Jill Ciment - Bookforum

With these eight extraordinary stories, Munro once again demonstrates what fiction — when shaped, burnished, and not held in check — can impart about the secret conspiracies of the heart.

R.Z. Sheppard - Time Magazine

It's Munro quality, not quantity, that puts her in the company of today's most accomplished writers of fiction at any length....Munro breaks the silence [with The Love of a Good Woman, but without devaluing the style. Not many writers can pull this off. It takes a balance of compassion and detachment worthy of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.

Barbara Croft - The Women's Review of Books

Fans...will find familiar rewards...the same rich language, the same casually brilliant insights....These stories are like a flock of birds in flight....amazing....On the surface, they seem almost artless, meandering and random, cluttered with detail. But they haunt you.

William Stevenson - Entertainment Weekly

Munro delivers uncanny insights into relationships and why people often make such unusual choices in life. Read all 23 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Alice Munro

Some stories in the collection are aboiut what Ms. Munro calls 'a new kind of old woman, women who grew up under one set of rules and then found they could live with another. . . .We associate old women with conventional sexual morality. . . . [But] "a lot of women lived more risky lives than their daughters. You take the risk of being lonely."  — Interviewed in The New York Times, November 30, 1998