Description

In eight new stories, a master of the shape extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just underneath the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the individual heart.Time stretches out in certain of the stories: a guy and a lady look-back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, because it turns out, that the real nature of the lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a girl finds in the span of an evening that mom she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, won't maintain her--she should rely on herself.Some options are created--in a will, in a choice to leave home--with permanent and astonishing effects. At different times tragedy is courted or hardly skirted: a person, driving her grandkids to go to the lakeside places of her youth, begins a game title that may have harmful effects whenever; whenever a mother includes a surprising dream of her infant. The rich layering that provides Alice Munro's function so powerful a feeling of living is specially apparent in the title story, where the death of an area optometrist brings a whole town into focus--in the preadolescent boys who find his body, for the man who probably killed him, for the person who must decide what to complete about what she might understand.