THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN
by Alice Munro
$24, Cloth
Reviewed by Marshall Bruce Gentry

Canadian Alice Munro may well be the best short story writer in the English-speaking world. Her stories create interesting situations and then deliver surprises and make artistic leaps that feel exactly right. Her female protagonists, usually living in times prior to the recent decades of feminism, might abandon everything for a lover, male or female, and they might pick a murderer to feel drawn toward. THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN collects eight stories that subtly and sophisticatedly uncover in the lives of apparently ordinary people all the absurdities of passion and then help us understand that apparently impulsive actions answer our deepest drives.

The book's title and its lovely cover painting of a dreaming woman may seem cliched, but like the stories, they trick us, and not just because the love of a good woman appears where one least expects it. For Munro, love is rarely romantically pretty; a love dream is likely to be one of bizarre copulation. Nor is goodness simple in Munro: some "good" women wear their propriety like armor, and true goodness may require amorality.

If there is an overall point to this collection, perhaps it is that our culture's current forgetting of feminism is a gigantic mistake, but even that statement of meaning is misleading if it implies that there is anything predictable here. The experience of reading an Alice Munro story involves having no idea what sort of peek at the human heart she is about to provide. Furthermore, it is surprising that Munro's women generally possess little heroism and that they may not even be particularly memorable as characters. Much of Munro's feminism is in the sadness we are led to feel over the maneuvers her women have had to teach themselves for achieving any sort of power.

Many of the stories here originally appeared in THE NEW YORKER (probably the most prestigious magazine for short fiction), but Munro revised considerably all those stories after publication there. At least four stories deserve to be considered contemporary classics. "The Love of a Good Woman" suggests people are brought together by weakness, silence, and denial rather than by sweet and open communication. (This story's near-novella length contributes to its success, and one wishes that more writers received encouragement from the publishing world to write works of such length.) In the haunting story "Cortes Island," a conventional young bride finds foreshadowing, in her neighbors' grotesque secrets, of her own emotional future. Re-envisioning my favorite story of all time, Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Munro's "Save the Reaper" gives us a grandmother named Eve who invites sex and death. In "Before the Change," a daughter finds how love has functioned for her father the abortionist. These four stories are the ones in the collection I respond to most favorably, but most writers would trade in limbs to have written any of the other stories here.

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