Munro's stories startlingly real

Ashley Simpson Shires, Special To The News

Published November 19, 2004 at midnight

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Runaway is Alice Munro's 11th collection of short stories. In it, she proves again that she is a writer who gets to the heart of things. She tells amazing stories without ever compromising a character for a plotline.

Her characters are so real that they walk off the page. I had to close the book after each story, letting the experience sink in. Then, haunted hours later, I pestered my husband, retelling the tales, trying to explain the images, the emotions that made each one so potent.

Short stories are an interesting genre. The form was first established in the mid-19th century, popularized through pulp magazines. Edgar Allen Poe called the short story the child of the American Magazine. Currently, though, the venue for short fiction has declined. Lorrie Moore, guest editor of the Best American Short Stories 2004, told Book Magazine, "The commercial slick short story has largely died out. The stories we are left with are almost all serious art."

It is an extreme honor, then, that Moore chose Munro's title story, "Runaway," to be included in the Best American Short Stories 2004, published by Houghton Mifflin. Several other stories from Runaway have been published in prestigious places this year as well: "Chance," "Soon" and "Silence" were all included in The New Yorker's Summer Reading Issue.

These four stories make up the first of eight short stories in the collection. "Runaway" details the attempt of a young woman to leave her husband. Things have gone bad for the couple, and to add to the sadness, their pet goat, Flora, has disappeared. Munro describes the pet beautifully: "She was quick and graceful and provocative as a kitten, and her resemblance to a guileless girl in love had made them both laugh."

"Chance," "Soon" and "Silence" are linked stories, a triptych that follows the relationship of the protagonist, Juliet, with her mother and later with her daughter. The unexpected ending is haunting, and the three stories beg a second reading.

The fifth story in the collection, "Passion," brilliantly captures an aspect of youth: the desire for passion, for the extraordinary. In "Trespasses," Munro tells the story of a young girl and the revelation of her family history: " 'There's ashes in there,' Harry said. His voice dropped in a peculiar way when he said ashes. 'Not ordinary ashes. Cremated ashes of a baby. This baby died before you were born. Okay? Sit down.'"

The last two stories of the collection, "Tricks" and "Powers," use the power of hindsight. Munro, 73, possesses both the life experience and the skill to narrate a story through long periods of time. The protagonist in "Tricks" loses her purse at a Shakespeare play, invoking a series of events (spanning 40 years) that are ironically Shakespearean in nature.

"Powers" is a longer story divided into titled sections. The first section begins in 1927. The last section, dating in the 1970s, describes a dream of the protagonist. In the dream, Munro writes, the past "begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash."

Each short story in Runaway is beautifully written and startlingly real. The characters are imbued with idiosyncrasies that make them unforgettable. And Munro is not prejudiced. She reveals the imperfections of upper-middle-class liberals as well as those of horse trainers, bachelors and waitresses. These characters, in turn, are inextricably bound to Munro's intriguing story lines. Each short story begs to be read again and again.

Ashley Simpson Shires is a freelance writer from Boulder.

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