шш in review DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER - University of British ...

BOOKS IN REVIEWing during the 1950's, everywhere displaysits author's unequalled maturity,her unerring control of her materials,and of their multitude of interconnections.It leaves its reader enraptured —over the stories as narratives, certainly,but more than that, over their humandetail and most of all over the uncompromisingTightness of the feelings theydescribe, define, depict and, finally, convey.Yet at the same time, and in keepingwith her sense of the mysteries of being,Munro's insights here are both more ambivalentand more technically complexthan those she has offered previously.One does not so much review this collectionas savour its delicacies. In "Eskimo,"which tells of a doctor's receptionist/mistress,Mary Joe embarks on aplane over the Pacific. Amid the strangethings she sees and dreams while aloft,we are offered this recollection of herdoctor, a snippet of their relationship:He liked her when the braces were stillon. They were on the first time he madelove to her. She turned her head aside, consciousthat a mouthful of metal might notbe pleasing. He shut his eyes, and she wonderedif it might be for that reason. Latershe learned that he always closed his eyes.He doesn't want to be reminded of himselfat such times, and probably not of her,either. His is a fierce but solitary relish.When the narrator of the title story,now a divorced real-estate agent, visitsthe house she grew up in, her memoriescause her to lash out at an off-handedremark made by Bob Marks, the man sheis with. He immediately apologizes and,in a conciliatory follow-up, asks "'Wasthis your room when you were a littlegirl?'" This question is equally inaccurate,but the narrator acquiesces so asto smooth things over. She then explainsto herself, and to us:And I thought it would be just as well tolet him think that. I said yes, yes, it wasmy room when I was a little girl. It wasjust as well to make up right away. Momentsof kindness and reconciliation areworth having, even if the parting has tocome sooner or later. I wonder if thosemoments aren't more valued, and deliberatelygone after, in the setups some peoplelike myself have now, than they were inthose old marriages, where love andgrudges could be growing underground, soconfused and stubborn, it must have seemedthey had forever.Trudy, the protagonist in "Circle ofPrayer," recalls her feelings after Dan,her husband, left her for another woman.She holds these feelings suspended intandem with a memory she has of Dan'smother playing the piano in the ramshacklehotel where the older womanlived, and where Dan and Trudy, yearsbefore, had spent their honeymoon.Munro describes Trudy's wonder:Why does Trudy now remember thismoment? She sees her young self lookingin the window at the old woman playingthe piano. The dim room, with its oversizebeams and fireplace and lonely leatherchairs. The clattering, faltering, persistentpiano music. Trudy remembers that soclearly and it seems she stood outside herown body, which ached then from the punishingpleasures of love. She stood outsideher own happiness in a tide of sadness. Andthe opposite thing happened the morningDan left. Then she stood outside her ownunhappiness in a tide of what seemed unreasonablylike love. But it was the samething, really, when you got outside. Whatare those times that stand out, clear patchesin your life — what do they have to do withit? They aren't exactly promises. Breathingspaces. Is that all?Reading passages such as these in context,we first notice family resemblanceswith other Munro stories — in subject,technique, tone, and effect — but thematurity of these stories eclipses earlierefforts and even exceeds those in TheMoons of Jupiter (1982). "Jesse andMeribeth," for example, which tells ofthe connections between two girlhoodbest friends, is related in subject andtreatment to "Boys and Girls," "RedDress—1946," and "The Shining240