Rebecca's Reviews > Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

There are nine stories in this 320-page volume, so the average story here is 30–35 pages – a little longer than I tend to like, but it allows Munro to fill in enough character detail that these feel like miniature novels; they certainly have all the emotional complexity. Her material is small-town Ontario and the shifts and surprises in marriages and dysfunctional families.

More commonly, she employs an omniscient third person to allow her to move between minds, yet I found that the three first-person stories were among the most memorable: in “Family Furnishings,” a woman recalls the encounter with her father’s cousin that made her resolve to be a writer; in “Nettles,” childhood friends meet again in midlife and a potential affair is quashed by the report of a tragedy; in “Queenie,” a young woman spends a short time living with her older stepsister and her husband, her music teacher she ran off with. This last one reminded me of Tessa Hadley’s stories – no doubt Munro has been an influence on many.

For instance, the title story, which opens the collection, gave me strong Elizabeth Hay and Mary Lawson vibes. A housekeeper sets off on the train to start a new life, encouraged by a romantic correspondence fabricated by her adolescent charge, Sabitha, and her friend. Munro pays close attention to domestic minutiae like furniture and clothing. Illness and death are frequent seeds of a story: cancer in “Floating Bridge,” the suicide of an ALS patient in “Comfort,” and dementia in the oft-anthologized “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”

Individual plots are less likely to stay with me than the quality of the prose, the compassionate eye, and the feeling of being immersed in a novel-length narrative when really I was only halfway through a few dozen pages. I’ll certainly read more Munro collections.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.