Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

A doyen of Canadian literature and internationally acclaimed short story
writer, Alice Munro is simply brilliant in these latest nine stories.
The dance of the sexes continues with probing, unsentimental insights
into marriage arrangements,

infidelities, and romantic illusions. In the title story, the
self-reliant and unloved Johanna follows her own successful marriage
destiny based on a fiction. An irony of the marriage game is wickedly
presented here, as it is in the story “The Bear Came Over the
Mountain,” where a long-time philandering husband is faced with his
senile wife falling in love with another man in a nursing home.

Many of Munro’s female characters have consistently taken sexual
risks and independent stances, and they continue to do so. In
“Queenie,” an impulsive, young woman runs off with the mean widower
next door, then runs off again to vanish without a trace, leaving the
sister-narrator to consider her colossal sense of abandonment, the kind
that is part of everyone’s life. Always, Munro points to the
patriarchal power and condition of marriage that women negotiate the
best way that they can.

Alice Munro has always written about the body—her own life’s
passage in effect. In “Floating Bridge,” “Comfort,” and “What
Is Remembered” death is never at a safe distance as ageing, disease,
and senility crowd in. Funerals dot the fictional landscape, and one
narrator details the embalming process. As always, Munro is amazingly
perceptive in what her characters say, think, feel, and do in response
to this final event. Above all, Munro writes in a beautifully nuanced
prose style. Small moments of illumination conveyed through language,
honed through minimalist and metaphoric eloquence, occur regularly. Her
characters’ dialogues and their self-talk are conversations as if
overheard by the reader. Real life, the ostensible metier of her art, is
a continuing illusion deepened by the experienced ambiguities and quests
for truths that permeate Munro’s fiction and fascinate her readers.