The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro Giller Prize Winner 1998

Let me make clear at the very beginning, I do not particularly like short story collections. So I approached reading The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro without my usual joyful, careless abandon. I feared this would be a task and not a pleasure. I was right. I found myself reading just to finish the book, not because I wanted more.

An article in The Globe and Mail  in July 2013 calls Alice Munro a genius, and gives examples to prove it.. She is a prize winning writer. She is regularly published in The New Yorker for heaven's sake! And, truth be told, she is a beautiful writer. She writes glorious sentences and paragraphs. There is a beauty and a flow to her language. She can capture the smallest details that define a scene or a character. But, for me, somehow all these wonderful pieces do not add up to a satisfactory whole in book form.

I think short stories are best in magazines. You pick up the magazine, read the story. Then you think about what it meant. I think short stories require this more than novels because so much is unsaid. The reader has to search between the lines.With these stories you see a moment in sharp distinction and all the things that led to this moment or will flow from this moment are like looking through haze and fog. What is going on behind the moment is just alluded to.

An example of this is the story Cortes Island.  A young married couple move into the basement suite of a house. Upstairs live Mr and Mrs Gorrie. Their son Ray owns the house, but doesn't live there. Sometimes the young woman has coffee upstairs with Mrs Gorrie. One one ocassion Mrs Gorrie asks if she has ever lived up north. She tells the young woman that she once lived on Cortes Island. The young wife is supposed to be looking for a job, but she stays home and tries to write. Eventually Mrs Gorrie asks if she will look after Mr Gorrie, who has suffered a stroke, so that she can go out and volunteer at the hospital. The young woman finally agrees and develops a way of communicating with Mr Gorrie.  He wants to look through his old scrapbooks which are stacked on a bookcase. They come to a specific clipping that he wants her to see. It describes a fire on Cortes Island. The owner of a house dies in the fire while his wife is away. His son somehow escapes and is found later in the woods with a supply of food. His wife returns on a boat belonging to James Thompson Gorrie.  There are questions about the son and why he had food with him. But the death is ruled accidental and the cause of the fire undetermined. By showing the woman this clipping, Mr Gorrie is telling her who he, his wife and Ray are. Soon after this the young couple have a falling out with Mrs Gorrie and they move.We readers are left to figure out the how, the why, and who are these people.

As I write this I realize that I probably enjoyed the stores more than I thought I would. Probably because as I've been writing I have had a change to think more about each story. In an ideal world, when I borrowed this book from the library, I would be able to keep it out for about 3 months. Then I could pick it up from time to time, when I wanted to read something but didn't want to take on a full novel. I could let the story settle in and think about it, and enjoy the thinking about it.

Some of my favourite passages:
- In Before the Change  this exchange between a young woman and her father captures the man and their relationship. I recognize this man:

What did he think about Kennedy and Nixon?
"Aw, they're just a couple of Americans."
I tried to open the conversation up a bit.
"How do you mean?'
When you ask him to go into subjects that he thinks don't need to be talked about, or take up an argument that doesn't need proving, he has a way of lifting his upper lip at one side, showing a par of big tobacco-stained teeth.
"Just a couple of Americans," he said, as if the words might have got by me the first time.

- In My Mother's Dream she describes a baby crying:

What is it about an infant's crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself? It is like a storm - insistent, theatrical, yet in a way pure and uncontrived. It is reproachful rather than supplicating - it comes out of a rage that can't be dealt with, a birthright rage free of love and pity, ready to crush your brains inside your skull.

If you like a good short story about what people will do for love, try The Love of a Good Woman.

NEXT: 1999 A Good House by Bonnie Burnard