Painterly prose

In English classrooms when I was at school, idle girls who should have been attending to their lessons used to play a silly but entrancing word game. You took the name of a boy you fancied and wrote it beneath your own. Then, crossing off all the common letters, you counted out the remainder like cherrystones - love, hate, friendship, marriage - to see how things would turn out between you. In Canada, it seems, this game is more ponderously called Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and it provides both the title and the theme for the latest book of short stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro.

Munro is an artist of the domestic interior - a quality she could be said, I suppose, to share with a majority of female fiction writers. There is something daunting about the thought of all this writerly industry - the busy, earthworm-like processing of domestic life into domestic fiction. But Munro stands at an angle to the mass of her contemporaries, set aside both by the beauty of her prose, which combines a sinewy simplicity with a limpid, elegiac quality much imitated (though never successfully) by students on creative writing courses, and by the calm intensity of her engagement with her material.

The stories in this volume share an autumnal, almost a valedictory, quality. Most are told in retrospect by a woman (all but one of her narratives views the world from a female perspective) looking back on some period of struggle or crisis; examining, as though from some elevated vantagepoint, the landscape through which she has been travelling, the different routes she might have taken, the different destinations that might have been reached if she had turned down this road, rather than that.

Munro is a virtuoso of a certain kind of painterly split perspective. She has the apparently effortless ability to focus sharply and simultaneously both on minute and pungent detail - the musty smell of a sheet kept too long in a cupboard; the look of a meal on a plate, once appetising, now congealed by an interruption of grief; the sensation of a kiss expected but withheld - and on the larger emotional landscape of which these details are a tiny, crucial part.

The effect is something like that of a medieval Book of Hours: scenes from domestic life - attraction, love, infidelity, disappointment, bereavement, grief - are modestly and affectionately rendered, with no special grandeur or emphasis, but with a kind of jeweller's precision that lends the dull, the grotesque or the pathetic a precise and singular eloquence.