The Love of a Good Woman

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

Alice Munro has observed that in recent years her stories have grown
“more disjointed and demanding and peculiar.” It is precisely these
qualities that make her later work so uncannily reflective of life as it
is actually lived. In this, her ninth collection of stories (a volume
for which she was awarded the 1998 Giller Prize), Munro uses intricate
shifts in time and perspective to capture the rhythms, textures,
nuances, and—above all—strangeness of human experience.

She brilliantly conveys that strangeness by juxtaposing the details of
everyday life with startling catastrophic events. In the title story,
for example, three boys come across a submerged car containing the body
of the local optometrist. Passing by the drowned man’s house later
that day, they are disquieted by the ordinariness of the scene:
“Nothing hollow or ominous, nothing that said that Mr. Willens was not
inside and that his car was not in the garage behind his office but in
Jutland Pond.” As the story unfolds, we learn that the optometrist’s
accident may have been staged to cover up an unpremeditated murder.

The home nurse to whom this unverified story is confessed gives voice
to a central theme of the collection when she acknowledges that she and
her employer failed to appreciate when they were young “how time would
pass and leave them not more but maybe a little less than what they used
to be.” A similar note of Chekhovian melancholy is struck in
“Jakarta” when a middle aged man makes the dismaying observation
that his grown children’s lives “seem closed in now, somewhat
predictable.” As she reads old newspaper clippings to the paralyzed
husband of her landlady, the newly married narrator of “Cortes
Island” is struck by the disparity between the couple’s scandalous
past and their conventional and painfully circumscribed present-day
lives. She interprets one of the husband’s nonverbal attempts at
communication as follows: “Did you ever think that people’s lives
could be like that and end up like this? Well, they can.”

Five of the eight stories in this superb collection were originally
published in The New Yorker (“in very different form,” according to
an author’s note).