I've read most of My Best Stories from the collections they originally appeared in, but this was a welcome re-acquaintance; a reunion with the nearly forgotten. Here's a longish passage from "Miles City, Montana" that demonstrates why Alice Munro is the master, my guru:
Disappeared.
But she swam. She held her breath and came up swimming.
What a chain of lucky links.
That was all we spoke about - luck. But I was compelled to picture the opposite. At this moment, we could have been filling out forms. Meg removed from us, Meg's body being prepared for shipment. To Vancouver - where we had never noticed such a thing as a graveyard - or to Ontario? The scribbled drawings she had made this morning would still be in the back seat of the car. How could this be borne all at once, how did people bear it? The plump, sweet shoulders and hands and feet, the fine brown hair, the rather satisfied, secretive expression - all exactly the same as when she had been alive. The most ordinary tragedy. A child drowned in a swimming pool at noon on a sunny day. Things tidied up quickly. The pool opens as usual at two o'clock. The lifeguard is a bit shaken up and gets the afternoon off. She drives away with her boyfriend in the Roto-Rooter truck. The body sealed away in some kind of shipping coffin. Sedatives, phone calls, arrangements. Such a sudden vacancy, a blind sinking and shifting. Waking up groggy from the pills, thinking for a moment it wasn't true. Thinking if only we hadn't stopped, if only we hadn't taken this route, if only they hadn't let us use the pool. Probably no one would ever have known about the comb.
There's something trashy about this kind of imagining, isn't there? Something shameful. Laying your finger on the wire to get the safe shock, feeling a bit of what it's like, then pulling back.
Most of the stories in this fine collection have that effect on me: the safe shock; the imaginings of different outcomes, a different life. Munro knows people, knows women, and although I am no more likely to run off to Victoria to open a book store than I am to fall in with a failed hotelier or lonesome taxidermist, the women in these stories might as well be me, so honestly are they portrayed.
I have no desire to tear apart these stories to find their working parts and meshing gears but will, rather, enjoy luxuriating in their after effects; the safe shocks which are anything but trashy.
