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By Root 511 0

in its drama, as is its brief happy madness, its comforts and vain griefs. And no one has brought greater depth of concentration and notice to the subject than Munro. No one has saturated her work with such startling physical observation and psychological insight. “He knew he had an advantage,” she writes in “Connection,” the book’s inaugural story, “and we had reached the point in our marriage where no advantage was given up easily.” And in the final story: “You touch a man that way to remind him that you are grateful.… It made me feel older than grandchildren would to see my daughter touch a man—a boy— this way. I felt her sad jitters, could predict her supple attentions.”

The style in which people circle one another, their mix of lunacy and hard intelligence, the manner in which our various pasts revolve simultaneously around the present, the way that children are always in a parent’s gravitational pull, even when out of sight, the fact that filial love has an infinitude of stories: all these are signalled by the book’s title and in the title story. “I found my father in the heart wing,” it begins, and the very many things it can mean to be a daughter are echoed through three generations gathered in that wing. Munro brings both a warm and cool eye to the project of loss: “I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive.”

Survival is often the hilarious miracle of Munro’s world. The harsh and mythic Canadian frontier has changed; it has found some retaliatory energy, encroached upon the home and riven it—in changing social times making a frontier of family life. And yet Munro is often joyous and funny, and this book is full not just of darkly jokey accident but of the voices of women often quite literally singing: “White Christmas” in the vivid and gritty “The Turkey Season”; “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in the haunted “Connection”; “In the Garden” in “Accident.” Women stand on their heads, make love in supply closets, gut turkeys with their bare hands. They are amused and amazed by their own journeys and landing places. A weave of surprise and inevitability in the destination more often favours surprise. “Aren’t we home?” are the last words of “Labor Day Dinner.” “She has a way to go yet” concludes “Accident.” Munro’s women may brood over their choices—which loneliness might have better suited them, which alliance might have best preserved the self: “I think of being an old maid, in another generation,” begins “Bardon Bus.” “There were plenty of old maids in my family. I come of straitened people, madly secretive, tenacious, economical. Like them, I could make a little go a long way.” But in the end there are powers beyond them that trump even the fierce will of the willful. The transits and upheaved settings of Munro’s stories make the formation of a character’s life a bit “catch-as-catch-can”—a term it’s possible to imagine is neither a fishing phrase nor a wrestling stance but, as a friend of mine likes to insist, the very name of a place in Canada.

In The Moons of Jupiter, first published in 1982, Munro began a transition to a kind of story that was less linear, more layered with the pentimento of memory, a narrative able to head through and into time, forward or backward, pulling in somewhere as a car might do simply to turn around. These are the haphazard migrations of life and love, she seems to say, and the theme of accident—happy or unhappy or both or neither—is something she revisits in story after story. In “Accident” the protagonist and her lover have their affair exposed when his son is killed sledding behind an automobile. That this is the man she eventually marries seems simultaneously cheaply arbitrary and fatefully expensive—it has transformed her life, and others’, and yet not: “She’s had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.” The girl written forever within the woman, the childish script of adult