I am not saying anything new by calling Alice Munro’s stories novelistic. And yet, in reading this collection, the first I’ve read of her work, I was continually surprised at two things. First is how dense in chracterization the stories were. Not much really happens in a lot of them, but the characters are so rich, so finely wrought, so specific. This is literary realism at its height. Second, Munro plays around with time quite loosely in these stories, jumping forwards and backwards years, with characters growing up or dying or changing in dramatic ways. All this in the span on thirty to fourty pages!
I don’t know how she can do all this in such an unassuming way, much more impressive than, say, Hemingway, whose writing has a simplicity that is more studied and artificial than natural. The simplicity here comes from the perspective that Munro takes---that of her characters, of ordinary people leading complicated, ordinary lives. She never approaches this with, say, the holiness and awe that Marilynne Robinson takes. Rev. John Ames in Gilead is too cerebral, contemplative, too obsessed with eternity to be a Munro character.