The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro

Alice Munro is another of the great Canadian short story writers, like Mavis Gallant. But unlike Mavis Gallant, who specializes in sharp, psychological insight and the complexities of expat life, Alice Munro writes about your neighbour in a small town, magnifying details that I would easily take for granted in day to day life.

This collection contains short stories that have in common the theme of love, but these are unsentimental portraits in which she draws a life's loves, hopes and disappointments with a few brisk strokes. In Cortes Island she describes perfectly the mounting agoraphobia of a newly wed in a basement apartment with a nosy landlady upstairs who hears her every move. And the passage I related to the most (and I related all too well to paranoia in a basement apartment, I'll admit) describes that particular time of day that, a pink-tinged twilight I was experiencing daily when I read this:

"In all these places where people lived, the lights come on around four in the afternoon, and then the streetlights came on, the lights in the trolley buses came on, and often too, the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun's setting - and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of the a faintly rosy twilight. People who had been shopping were going home, people who had been in the houses all day came out to take a little walk that would make home more appealing."

Broad brushstrokes and a poetic hyper-realism - here's another quote that reverberated for me, from The Children Stay.

"This was not one of the dolled-up streets near the harbor - it was a street of shoe - and bicycle-repair shops, discount linen and fabric stores, of clothes and furniture that had been so long in the windows that they looked secondhand even if they weren't. On some windows sheets of golden plastic as frail and crinkled as old cellophane were stretched inside glass to protect the merchandise from the sun. All these enterprises had been left behind just for this one day, but they had the look of being fixed in time as much as cave paintings or relics under sand."

She brings focus to things (and people) you could rush past without noticing, and elevates them from the humdrum to the noble. So while reading her stories is far from escapist, at least you emerge with a sharper, more imaginative view of the people next door - while for anyone who isn't in Canada, her universe is hopefully exotic and myterious.

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