Volume 41, Number 21 · December 22, 1994
Writer Without Borders
By Ann Hulbert
Open Secrets
by Alice Munro
Knopf, 294 pp., $23.00
Alice Munro is the latest and best proof that a provincial literary imagination can be the most expansive kind of imagination there is. Fixated on lives in out-of-the-way Canadian places and dedicated to the short story rather than to what she has called 'the mainstream big novel,' she finds pioneering energy in the 'feeling of being on the margins': it inspires the desire and the power to remake boundaries. For Munro, marginality has nothing to do with isolation, and everything to do with 'connection. That was what it was all about,' she writes in The Moons of Jupiter (1983). In seven collections of stories and one novel, she has shown fate, and also fiction, to be a rather miraculous matter of unexpected linkages and leaps.
Review, 2805 words
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