Amplitudes the Progress of Love

By Paul Gray

In her fifth collection of short stories, Alice Munro, 55, continues to buck the genre's fashionable trend toward miniaturization and microplots. Her characters stubbornly refuse to trudge like zombies through brief but nonetheless tedious interludes. They do not act like literary artifacts or wan verbal gestures toward ennui. They behave, instead, as if they had all the time and space imaginable to lead and ponder their complicated lives. Each of the eleven pieces in The Progress of Love seems to contain enough material for a fair-sized novel; Munro's art of compression emphasizes amplitudes rather than economies.

The settings contribute to this consistent sense of spaciousness: farms and small towns in the author's native Canada, places where change comes grudgingly or hardly at all, where the annual opening of a summer home confirms continuity: "Everything was always the same. Here was the boring card game that taught you the names of Canadian wildflowers; here was the Scrabble set with the Y and one of the U's missing." Such environments do not preclude drama or excitement; they lend individual events a scale of history.

Miles City, Montana, for example, opens dramatically: "My father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who had been drowned." The story that follows, however, is not about this death but rather its effect on the girl who tells it. She grows up, marries, moves from Ontario to Vancouver, has two children. While driving across the northern U.S. on a trip back home, she and her husband stop at a municipal swimming pool in Montana so their daughters can briefly escape the midday heat. The younger one almost drowns, and this frightening moment triggers a rush of memories in the mother, including the one that begins the story. As a child, she hated the adults who could not protect another child from death; now, thinking of her own daughters and a narrow escape, she hopes that she and her husband will "be forgiven, in time, for everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous -- all our natural, and particular, mistakes."

Munro also creates the illusion of leisure by playing tricks with time. She introduces stories at the point where other writers might finish them, then uses flashbacks to build up remarkable suspense about the disposition of foregone conclusions. Fits starts off matter-of-factly: "The two people who died were in their early sixties." There has been, it turns out, a particularly gory murder-suicide in a small town. Nobody knows what drove this couple to such a fate. Speculation flourishes: "A division of opinion became evident between men and women. It was nearly always the men who believed and insisted that the trouble had been money, and it was the women who talked of illness." Yet the story's emphasis falls not on the victims but on the woman, a next-door neighbor, who finds the bodies. Her reaction to the horror she discovers will affect the way others, including her husband and two teenage sons, treat her for the rest of her life. In White Dump a grown daughter is first seen visiting her father and his second wife; the major event, the decision years earlier of the first wife to run away, evolves almost glancingly, into a stunning finality.

Sometimes The Progress of Love seems an ironic title. Munro describes the kinds of erosion that can occur when two people have rubbed against each other too long: "They were intimate. They had found out so much about each other that everything had got cancelled out by something else. That was why the sex between them could seem so shamefaced, merely and drearily lustful, like sex between siblings." A wife reaches for kind thoughts about her husband and almost succeeds: "I would think how humble he was, really, taking on such a ready-made role of husband, father, breadwinner, and how I myself in comparison was really a secret monster of egotism. Not so secret, either -- not from him." But such knowledge, in these stories, brings gains as well / as losses, the wisdom that only experience can impart. One character realizes: "Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later." This book is full of such compassion, and such moments.