The Love of a Good Woman

Another brilliant short-story collection (the fifth by Munro that I've read). More insights into the home-life of everyday Canadian small-town folk (optometrists, abortionists, murderers, librarians, adulterers, amateur actors, etc.). As usual, each story quietly does something new and outrageous to overturn our ideas of how a short story should work. Munro cavalierly advances time by twenty or thirty years, or shifts to a different viewpoint character, just when we're expecting a big reveal. Or we go backwards towards a piece of information that Munro then decides not to give us after all. Great fun!

The title story, especially, is a tour de force in which we are primed in the opening paragraphs to take an interest in a sudden death, show more but then determinedly led away from it to follow various characters who don't seem to have anything to do with the matter, but tell us a remarkable amount about the workings of small-town society in the fifties. And a beautifully obscure ending that makes you slam on the brakes and rewind the story in your mind to sort out what was really going on all along. show less

These brilliant stories explore what has always been theorized and never quite materializes: that a man can be redeemed by the love of a good woman. Munro's interior views of a cohort of Canadian middle class mothers, caretakers, and their families are quietly insightful, and each of the eight stories immediately pulls the reader into circumstances that would be mundane coming from anyone else's pen. The murder of an abuser, confessed to a home health aide; a hero doctor father who acts as the town's abortionist and is blackmailed by his assistant; a woman who falls in love with the director of an amateur production and leaves her children for him; a ten year old girl's acceptance of her mother's involvement in a menage-a-trois; and a show more mother whose newborn rejects her in favor of her aunt - each narrator peels out the layers of the story in a calm manner that belies the disruptions and disturbances within. Munro is THE short story genius of our time. show less

A small town optometrist is found dead under unusual circumstances and his suspicious past becomes an issue for a young woman who is trying to reconcile the sacrifice of her professional dreams. A bitter landlady who may be harboring a terrible secret from long ago torments one of her tenants, a young woman with a tenuous grasp on reality. A daughter must confront the consequences of what her father does for a living and her complicity in that endeavor. An adulterous wife tries to come to grips with the reason she has destroyed her family. A mother’s inexperience and neglect nearly results in the death of the child that she is not really sure she wanted to have in the first place.

These are several of the stories told in The Love of a show more Good Woman, Alice Munro’s collection that focuses on ordinary people who must deal with extraordinary circumstances involving lost love, betrayal, and death, among other things. It is also the second volume of the author’s fiction that I have read and I confess to having a “love/not really feeling it” relationship with her work. On one hand, I appreciate the exquisite craftsmanship of her writing; it truly is amazing how much detail and insight she can pack into only about 30 or 40 pages of text. Also, each of these tales provides a master’s class in subtle storytelling, with many of the important plot twists foreshadowed early on or revealed in flashback near the end.

For as much as I admired the quality of the writing, however, I found each of the eight stories themselves to be oppressively grim and unpleasant. Worse than that, though, was the lack of single likeable character anywhere in the entire book. With no one to root for (or, at least, identify with emotionally), I found myself approaching these tales in an overtly clinical manner—almost as a professor might grade a stack of term papers—rather than allowing myself to be immersed in the protagonist’s world. Needless to say, reading this book was not a particularly satisfying experience and it is not one that I am likely to repeat again soon. show less

The Love of a Good Woman is another example of why Alice Munro is one of the most powerful writers working today. The stories in this volume are not feel-good, make you happy kind of stuff. They are small pieces of emotional dynamite. Sometimes the dynamite goes off, when you least expect it; other times it doesn't, just when you were expecting a boom. Either way, she leaves you astonished at the way simple incidents in our daily lives can often have such devastating results.

Én szeretem Munro-t: kevés író tud ilyen magas színvonalon ennyire egységes, összetéveszthetetlen világot teremteni. Bámulom, ahogy az apró cselekvésekből és pillanatokból felépíti ezt az egyedülállóan hétköznapi melankóliát, az pedig, ahogy (elsősorban női) figurái kialakulnak a keze alatt… hát végtelenül boldog lennék, ha utána tudnám csinálni. Vagy legalább megérteném, hogyan csinálja. Novelláinak kulcsmomentuma talán kivétel nélkül az ígéret, amit az olvasónak tesz: hogy a szereplőkkel történni fog valami sorsfordító, valami különleges, valami, ami kiszakítja őket sivár kis létezésükből – és ami utolérhetetlen bravúr, hogy ennek a történésnek az elmaradását, show more hamvába hullását éppen olyan halk katarzisként tudja ábrázolni, mint magát a beteljesülést. Munro igazi atmoszféra-központú szerző, mint Henry James vagy Mansfield, ezért nehéz kiragadott idézetekkel érzékeltetni művészetét. Nála az egésznek van jelentése: ahogy szereplői finoman megérintik egymást, vagy megérintenek egy tárgyat egymás helyett, vagy tárgyként érintik egymást… Súlya van minden jelentéktelen félmondatnak és mozdulatnak. Egyszerű, finom vonalú, szép próza, belemerülős, a felszínes vizsgálatnak nem adja meg magát. show less

It’s rare that short stories resonate with me. Even when I like the characters, writing, pacing, etc., I typically just feel like a good friend stopped by for a minute when they should have stayed the night. I want more! There are a few notable exceptions though, and this collection is an example.

I loved this book for the same reasons I loved Runaway. The characters were engaging, the stories felt complete, and the pacing was impeccable. While other short story writers too frequently give me a glimpse of a person I’d like to know more of, Ms. Munro’s stories all feel to me that they’re exactly as long as they should be. I read this months ago and unfortunately I can’t remember a specific story that stood out, but I am left show more with a very concrete feeling that this collection was successful for me and has further cemented Ms. Munro as one of my favorite short story writers. show less

This is a collection of short stories. All of them are set in Canada, often in small towns or summer cottages, most of them in the 1950s or 60s, and feature love and sex, affairs and babies, and people who sometimes feel almost painfully realistic.

The title story was actually the first thing of Alice Munro's I ever read, in some anthology or other, and I was immediately impressed by it, particularly by all the tiny little details that simultaneously seemed so true to familiar human experience and so utterly original. What strikes me now, having read the rest of the stories in this collection, is how often Munro provides us with these deft little details while simultaneously leaving the big emotional stuff that's actually at the heart of show more the story mostly implicit and hinted at. This doesn't always entirely work for me; there are pieces in here that I find a little unsatisfying, no matter how well-written they are. But when it works, it really works.

Rating: I'm giving this one a 4/5, but the best stories definitely rate higher than that. show less