The New York Review of Books

“Love never dies,” says a character from Alice Munro’s 1994 collection, Open Secrets. And the woman listening to him feels “impatient to the point of taking offense. This is what all the speechmaking turns you into,” she thinks, “a person who can say things like that. Love dies all the time….”

The birth and death of erotic love, and the strange places people are led to because of it, “on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them,” as it is put in “Vandals,” another story in that same collection, is Munro’s timeless subject. In her new collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, showing that the impulse toward love, if not love itself, dies hard, she follows her characters’ erotic lives straight through the chemotherapy ward, into the nursing home, on into the funeral parlor. In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” a faithless husband puts his wife into a nursing home only to watch her acquire there a new, wheelchaired beau. In “Family Furnishings” a woman in a nursing home incessantly chants “fit as a fiddle and ready for love.” In “Floating Bridge” a terminally ill woman is led out into the woods for a kiss by a strange young boy who is both god of love and angel of death—Munro would naturally see these figures entwined. In “Comfort” the protagonist has a romantic encounter with an undertaker, whose activities of bloodletting and body cavity drainage (like the taxidermist-lover in “Vandals”) suggest perhaps one darkly funny opinion of Munro’s regarding the drama of love. The narrator of “Queenie,” surrounded by couples, “each…with its own heat and disturbance,” notes her own desire for solitude, “for there was nothing I could see in their lives to instruct me or encourage me.”

Like Henry James, Alice Munro knows that love’s “floating bridge” between worlds—and over swamps—can bring a ruinous fate as easily and indifferently as can its absence. But Munro also knows that the arranging of love, improvised or institutional, and the seismic upheavals of its creation and dismantling—the boards rising and falling precariously beneath the feet—is both a kind of pornography of life as well as the very truth of it: it is often the most persuasive and defining force in the shape of individual existence and individual fate. Not that this is to be valued, or judged—in Munro’s world there is a powerlessness before the whole matter—only that such a thing is to be maturely understood and perceptively watched. “Their marriages were the real content of their lives,” she writes in “Comfort,” “…the sometimes harsh and bewildering, indispensable content of her life.” Unlike James, a permanent tourist in the land of marriage and romantic union—a subject endlessly suited to the short-story genre—Alice Munro is intimately informed about what actually goes on there, and it is but one of the many reasons she is (to speak historically, and to speak even, say, in a Russian …