Scenes from the lives of women

A woman, usually middle aged and in possession of a complicated personal past and a lengthy family history, is the typical narrator in the meticulously constructed, narratively dense short stories of Canadian writer Alice Munro. In a career spanning 30 years, her stage has always been rural Canada. Her speakers are individuals who think and feel, who have suffered the expected defeats of life, the betrayals and disappointments, yet who manage to heal themselves and to survive, and who are able to recall events with the "accidental clarity" and the sense of distance which informs Munro's vision. Interestingly, unlike many women writers, Munro is not defiant in her approach to survival. The narratives are calm, invariably sustained by a subdued sense of wonder wonder at how any of it, all of it, could possibly have happened.

Life is the puzzle, or rather the maze, which has sneakily surrounded the characters, much to their own surprise. These stories are black, often sinister and can be sharp while yet avoiding cleverness and trickery. Nor does she resort to folksy comforts, either. Technically she is far more original than it might at first seem. Munro does play with plot, often choosing to arrive at the cold heart of a tale by what appears to be a circular route, although everything, each gesture, every comment, has a purpose.

It is as if she were deliberately attempting to evoke the randomness, the accidental quality of life itself and those seemingly self contained episodes an individual life often comprises. A moment from a long forgotten marriage will be recalled with forensic detail; a memory will cause a narrator to ponder the present life of a former husband: "I haven't seen Andrew for years, don't know if he is still thin, has gone completely grey, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed." Munro's language is exact, clinical, almost businesslike but is also gentle to the point of tenderness.

In contrast to the almost terrifyingly intelligent work of her more obviously subversive countrywoman, Margaret Atwood, Munro's fiction is filled with the thoughtful wisdom of experience, of one who has watched and listened. Munro is also a writer whose work, though working within the intensely personal, carries a consistent element of social history.

In common with William Trevor and John Updike, those other custodians of the contemporary short story, Munro has long been a New Yorker regular. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968. It was soon followed by Lives of Girls and Women and Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You, The Beggar Maid, shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize, remains the only short story collection yet to have been, thus singled out. The Moons of Jupiter appeared three years later, while The Progress of Love (1986) - possibly her strongest collection - and Friend of My Youth (1990), confirmed her international status.

With Open Secrets (1994), Munro signalled that she was not content to continue writing according to a proven winning formula and set out to achieve a new narrative cohesion through a group of eight interconnected long stories encompassing a hundred year time span. It is a demanding, at times awkwardly contrived volume, but is also an important book. Munro may work within a narrow range but she is never complacent and is rarely predictable.

Alice Munro - Selected Stories (Chatto, £16.99 in UK) gathers 23 stories from her eight collections to date. It is a fascinating volume in the sense that it assembles a portrait of a writer through the various stages of her artistic development. Unfortunately, we are not told who made the selection - was it Munro herself, or an anonymous editor? Also, considering that this handsome, substantial book virtually amounts to a literary retrospective, surely the publishers should have commissioned a critical introduction? Chatto's oversight is a lost opportunity for an interesting critical evaluation.

Be warned: these are not easy stories. Munro's approach to narrative invariably offers a combination of slow, relaxed narrative voice and complex plotting.

"Miles City, Montana" is one of her finest stories. While in terms of theme it moves beyond her usual territory, technically it is a good example of Munro's inspired, often risky, use of slow plotting and nit picking descriptive precision. A woman recalls a long car journey undertaken in 1961 with her then husband and two young daughters in "a brand new car, our first - that is, our first brand new. It was a Morris Oxford, oyster coloured (the dealer had some fancier narre, for the colour) - a big small car".

Travelling across a hot, empty landscape, the children become restless in the car. They want a beach, so the search for a swimming pool begins. Arriving at a public swimming pool is seen as a triumph - except for the fact that it is lunchtime and the lifeguard is off duty, yet the mother allows the children into the pool. Within minutes the narrator, beginning to relax, wanders off to find a soft drink, and then panics, and returns. At first there is no sign of the smaller child, then the narrator remembers: ". . . just within my view, a cluster of pink ruffles appeared, a bouquet, beneath the surface of the water." The child does not drown. The point of the story is the skill with which Munro slowly draws her narrative to the edge of tragedy. "The most ordinary tragedy. A child drowned in a swimming pool at noon on a sunny day. Things tidied up quickly." Constructing the procedure that would have occurred had her child died, the narrator snaps herself out of her dark thoughts; asking: "There's something trashy about this kind of imagining, isn't there?"

Violent death is a common theme in her work. In another story, a quiet woman becomes the centre of interest when she discovers a neighbourhood couple lying dead in their house. The deaths are secondary to her calm attitude. A more recent story, Carried Away", tells how a lonely librarian finds herself receiving letters from a soldier she has never met. The correspondence, respectful and formal, continues throughout the war, and on his return it ends. Later in the same story, the man, now married, is decapitated in an accident at a sawmill. Another character, the boss, braces himself: "Either pick it up or tell somebody to pick it up . . . He carried it delicately and securely as you might carry an awkward but valuable jug."

A new bride is relentlessly observed: ". . . her face looked as if it would come off on a man's jacket, should she lay it against his shoulder in the dancing." The narrator of "The Turkey Season" recalls how she and her fellow workers watched one of the men wondering whether to approach the woman who was interested in him. "We wanted to see how he could be moved."

These are confiding, truth telling stories, in which women address their pasts and reconstruct the histories of others. Above all, each narrative slowly moves towards a moment of recognition, an absolute discovery, within the wider world of wholly realised lives.