Quiet Virtues

By R.Z. Sheppard

The chronically depressed market for the short story has not discouraged Alice Munro, who, with the publication of The Love of a Good Woman (Knopf; 340 pages; $24), now has 10 volumes of stories to her credit. But it's Munro's quality, not quantity, that puts her in the company of today's most accomplished writers of fiction at any length.

Three virtues distinguish Munro's work. First, she packs more life into 30 pages than most novelists get into 300. And she does it writing about her native region, homely farm-town Ontario. Second, she moves her characters through time and space with the calm and precision of an air-traffic controller. Third, she writes mostly about women at turning points and points of no return.

A striking example is the unmarried narrator of Before the Change, who is back home for a visit with her father, a local physician who communicates in sarcasms. The hidden truths about their unshared lives pop up when least expected, a delayed-action effect that Munro achieves by casting the story as an unsent letter from the woman to her former lover.

"R. My stomach is still a little puffy. There are no marks on it, but I can bunch it up in my hands," is the first hint we get that the unnamed letter writer has been pregnant. By the time she tells her doctor dad that she had a baby and put it up for adoption, she knows his secret: the "specials," as he calls some of his patients, are young women who have traveled long distances to get illegal abortions. From there, the father-daughter ironies gather for a stoic conclusion.

In stories such as Cortes Island, The Children Stay and Rich As Stink, women are stretched beyond the limits of convention by passion and circumstance. They are not complainers. Reticence is the pervading style of Munro's rural Ontario, where "drawbacks and adversity were not to be noticed, not to be distinguished from their opposites." Munro breaks the silence, but without devaluing the style. Not many writers can pull this off. It takes a balance of compassion and detachment worthy of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.

--By R.Z. Sheppard