Alice Munro: Runaway

I have a confession to make. I hadn't read any Alice Munro until recently, when I decided that I should give the latest Nobel Prize for literature a try. I came across this collection of short stories, without much preparation, knowing only that "Alice Munro is the queen of the short story". Well, only a few pages in I could see why. This has to be the best short story collection I've ever read (a close tie would be Raymond Carver's Cathedral - but more about that some other time).

Runaway - published in 2004 - contains eight stories and leaves you feeling as though you have read eight full length novels. Each story is centered around a main character and all of the characters are brilliantly created. As readers we are immediately carried within the characters' worlds and so immersed in their lives that at the end of each story we feel as though we had just lived a whole rich, deep and compelling life with them. Even in terms of time, Munro isn't afraid to take us back into their past and forward to their last days, within the space of a few dozen pages. In doing so, she elicits our understanding and deep sympathy for their motives and desires. At the same time - and this is what makes the stories so compelling - we are left feeling that a mystery is still intact. We have witnessed something true, but we can't exactly pinpoint what it is. Each plot leads us breathlessly to the end leaving us to realise that this is - of course - the only possible ending, and at the same time questioning why. There is a necessity that we can only recognize and not dare to explain.
 The stories themselves for the most part concern ordinary people in ordinary situations, but the realism is so vivid, the psychological analysis so keen and the emotion so powerful -  but never over the top - that they stay with you long after you have finished reading.What Munro explores so well is the dynamics of desire and how this enters in all human relationships: mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, friends, lovers.
My impulse after finishing each story was to close the book, not wanting to talk about the story or attempt to analyze it, but simply silently acknowledging the mysterious truth that had been portrayed.  I realize that I am not giving many details about the stories themselves, but the truth is the only thing I really feel compelled to say is what Jonathan Franzen wrote about this book for The New York Times Book Review:

"Runaway is so good that I don't want to talk about it here. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it . . . Which leaves me with the simple instruction that I began with: Read Munro! Read Munro!" 

And that's exactly what we all should do.