Open Secrets

Sarah Robertson is associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Alice Munro’s eighth collection of short stories (all but one of which
were originally published in The New Yorker) splendidly consolidates her
reputation as a storyteller of Chekhovian dimensions. Effortlessly
spanning generations, the eight stories gathered here brilliantly evoke
the dislocating effects of time, the interrelatedness of the mundane and
the universal, the elusiveness of truth, and the conflicting human
longings for anarchy and security.

Munro’s characters are constantly dropping out of their stifled lives
and seeking to re-invent themselves. The heroine in “The Jack Randa
Hotel” follows her ex-lover to Australia and assumes the identity of a
dead woman. Both heroines in “The Albanian Virgin” attempt
transformations, one in the Albanian mountains, the other in a Victoria
bookstore. The act of vanishing takes a more ambivalent turn in the
title story, in which the reflections of a lawyer’s wife on the fate
of a missing teenager inevitably merge into self-examination; at one
point, she glimpses “another life she is leading, a life just as long
and complicated and strange and dull as this one.”

There is nothing dull about these stories. They are intricate marvels
that defy paraphrase. By setting the majority of them in Carstairs,
Ontario, and environs, Munro has fashioned a universe as rich and
fascinating as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.