The Progress of Love

A woman visits her childhood home. A Canadian girl's aunt from California comes for a visit. A woman gets an inheritance from her father. I could choose any one of the above descriptions to describe what happens in the story "The Progress of Love". But don't be fooled; they're not what the story is about. Such is the beauty of Alice Munro's work: Like life itself, her short stories defy easy definitions. I love Alice Munro for her efficiency and anti-earnestness. She will paint the landscape of the world in a single short story. In twenty pages she will map out the human heart with her indigenous sense of direction. I have read entire novels that were unable to capture the depth embodied in Alice Munro's short stories. The vast majority of novel writers should be ashamed for being so wasteful with words. In a world full of unsubstantiated hype, Alice Munro's story collections are an exception. Every time I think she has outdone herself - that this is it, she can't get any better than this- she writes new stories and proves me wrong. I love picking up the latest collection of her stories and knowing that, good as it is, the best is yet to come. Her older work is marked heavily by moments of revelation. While some readers may find this subject matter unfulfilling, it cannot be argued that she reveals these moments with impeccable skill. Her later work (see "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" and "Runaway") capitalizes on this skill and expands it, using these surprising and illuminating moments to push the dramatic action forward. Unlike many great artists who reach the summit of their talent and then spend the rest of their careers falling and fumbling about with the rest of us mortals, Alice Munro consistently finds ways to climb higher and higher into the stratosphere. Taking this into consideration it makes perfect sense that, with regard to Munro's writing, "heavenly" may be the appropriate word.

Mid-period Munro, when she began in earnest to explore a talent for expansiveness. The title story is as fine as anything she's written. The final pages reap deliciously what the story's juxtaposed timelines and plots have set up. You walk away from the story shaking your head, sighing, aching. Not as fine a collection as The Moons of Jupiter, also out of the same period in her career, but still hard to beat by another writer in the medium. It seems short stories have waited for Munro for too long, and we are too privileged to be readers in her lifetime.

Alice Munro is, by my reckoning, the greatest short story writer of our time. Her collection, The Progress of Love, is ample proof. I recommend her work with trepidation to aspiring short story writers because her writing is intimidatingly exquisite. Charles Baxter or Lorrie Moore could profit from a session in the batting cage with Munro, but for most everybody else, it would be like taking your Tee-Ball Leaguer for a hitting tutorial with Ted Williams. What's so good about Munro's writing? Foremost is her precision. The center of the short story writer's craft is economy. It's very difficult to find a word that doesn't advance both story and theme in Munro's work. The reader finds himself stopping to ponder passages not because they're opaque but because they are so powerfully rendered and so intricately woven. I've taught "Monsieur Les Deux Chapeaux" for seven years, and Ross's moment on the bridge never fails to transport me and my students. I don't expect to find an end to my thought about this moment or the story itself. It will unquestionably remain a short story by which I measure all others.

Alice Munro is such a fine writer that she can take some fifty-odd characters over the course of a story collection and make them seem like various aspects of a complex and sensitive personality. These stories are careful and elegant, and writers will note Munro's idiosyncratically beautiful use of unexpected adjectives. But even without such wonderful writing, her stories would speak for themselves: her characters live life directly, simply, and often painfully, and they have more feeling than they can express. Munro does it for them. This collection includes "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink," one of the most moving stories I can imagine. Read it and weep.