The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Selected Stories by Alice Munro
Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Alice Munro. Selected Stories. Knopf, 1996. 545 pp. $30.00.

“If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could,” so the narrator of Alice Munro’s story “The Ottawa Valley” finishes her tale.

The twenty-eight stories compiled from Munro’s seven collections of short fiction to make up Selected Stories are at once proper stories and not, full of answers and nonanswers, of people always hovering on the boundary of self-understanding. Munro has an archaeological approach to her subjects, as if shaking sand through screen after screen to find the missing pieces, if any, that might complete the puzzle. Indeed, change is the only constant in Munro’s tales. Her characters are inherently complex and unsettled, and her plots move in broad, sweeping strokes back and forth over time, traversing lifetimes and generations. Munro approaches her subjects from a vicissitude of angles and with an unrelenting psychological perspective, all in a subtle yet unblushing tone, and with a crispness of observation. But mystery only unravels further mystery, though in much of her work Munro treads and retreads the same territory: the journey of a young woman—always astute and observant—out of the poverty of the rural towns of Western Ontario and into the larger world and her search for happiness and fulfillment, her disappointments with love and with men.

Precisely by retraveling the same territory—this capacity “to remember more” and “to bring back all”—Munro so accurately maps the vagaries of fate. In A Wilderness Station, a story from the author’s most recent collection, Open Secrets, Munro provides us with this summation: “This world is a wilderness, in which we may indeed get our station changed, but the move will be out of one wilderness station unto another.”

Perhaps what slightly mars this gathering of Munro’s work is the absence of any editorial explanation why the particular stories included in Selected Stories were chosen from the impressive bulk of Munro’s oeuvre. Otherwise, this collection stands as an important survey of the work of a writer easily distinguished as one of this century’s masters of the short story form. [Jeanne Claire van Ryzin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Selected Stories by Alice Munro Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Alice Munro. Selected Stories. Knopf, 1996. 545 pp. $30.00. “If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could,” so the narrator of Alice Munro’s story “The Ottawa Valley” finishes her tale. The twenty-eight stories compiled from Munro’s seven collections of short fiction to make up Selected Stories are at once proper stories and not, full of answers and nonanswers, of people always hovering on the boundary of self-understanding. Munro has an archaeological approach to her subjects, as if shaking sand through screen after screen to find the missing pieces, if any, that might complete the puzzle. Indeed, change is the only constant in Munro’s tales. Her characters are inherently complex and unsettled, and her plots move in broad, sweeping strokes back and forth over time, traversing lifetimes and generations. Munro approaches her subjects from a vicissitude of angles and with an unrelenting psychological perspective, all in a subtle yet unblushing tone, and with a crispness of observation. But mystery only unravels further mystery, though in much of her work Munro treads and retreads the same territory: the journey of a young woman—always astute and observant—out of the poverty of the rural towns of Western Ontario and into the larger world and her search for happiness and fulfillment, her disappointments with love and with men. Precisely by retraveling the same territory—this capacity “to remember more” and “to bring back all”—Munro so accurately maps the vagaries of fate. In A Wilderness Station, a story from the author’s most recent collection, Open Secrets, Munro provides us with this summation: “This world is a wilderness, in which we may indeed get our station changed, but the move will be out of one wilderness station unto another.” Perhaps what slightly mars this gathering of Munro’s work is the absence of any editorial explanation why the particular stories included in Selected Stories were chosen from the impressive bulk of Munro’s oeuvre. Otherwise, this collection stands as an important survey of the work of a writer easily distinguished as one of this century’s masters of the short story form. [Jeanne Claire van Ryzin]

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