Fiction 2

FICTION 7 Could he picture Rose moving with him to the city? Amongst Indian-hating landlords, Me-generation males, women fond of discussing orgasm and the layered look? And could he picture himself, child of affluence, settling in here for an eternity of dirty diapers, brutal poverty ...? AI Chaput, a policeman, appears in several tales, and with each appearance moves farther along the road from self-absorbed indifference towards compassion and understanding. In 'Reuben: he finds himself drawn to an Indian boy, wild, rebellious, and angry, whom, by the protocols of his official identity, Chaput should slot into the pigeonhole labelled 'antagonist .' This potential bridge also falls, calamitously undermined by the boy Reuben's conclitioning when he looks at Chaput to see only a symbol of oppressive authority. The mood of these eleven stories ranges widely from the bleakness of 'Reuben' through poignancy to comic whimsy as MacDonald chronicles with understanding perception the rich diversity of small triumphs, follies, and disasters of his characters struggling for their human dignity in the myopia of cultural conditioning and selfdeception , an affliction hardly limited to the inhabitants of Keewuttunnee . Every bridge out of town leads only to Keewuttunnee. There is no discernible trend in this sampleof newcomers, at leaslto this arbiter's eye, because each has found an individual voice; they are all voices worth hearing. 2 I MARK LEVENE 'One of our favorite writers,' declares one of the new literary stars of New York. 'One of the great short story writers: intones a Canadian socialite. These designer judgments about Alice Munro do not, of course, mean that The Progress of Love (A Douglas Gibson BooMlilcCleliand and Stewart, 309, $22.95), the book that has broadened her international reputation, has anything to do with denim or a pri2ed banquette. Whatever its tone, the praise is fully warranted: this collection of eleven intricately narrated stories is close to a masterpiece, close because a few of the pieces repeat patterns with a loosening grip, a sudden loss of attention. Nevertheless, at least three - 'The Progress of Love: 'Miles City, Montana: and 'Circle of Prayer' - belong among the best in the language. Munro's is a realm of beSieged families and warring feelings far removed from the phantom sorrows of the Holocaust and from 'the green places of the world .. . swarming with strongarm philosophers and armed prophets.' A world of memories, small towns, and rooms where 'the window blinds were down to the sills' and 'the air had a weight and thickness, as if it were cut into a block that exactly filled the room: it is equally removed from urban nightmares, the exultations of a freefloating intelligence, and dense subversions of narrative process. But 8 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 Munro is close to the territory of her more technically lavish contemporaries in her fascination with the complexities of telling, of stories, and with the intimate, often frightening link between invention and love. The seismic shiftings that turn compassion to hatred and heartlessness, that suddenly 'split open' - an insistent phrase throughout the collection - are recorded with extraordinary precision, but perhaps it is Munro's supple language that is the book's finest legacy, her magnificent ability to capture nuances ofsensibility and appearance. 'I wanted to hide: says the mother in 'Miles City, Montana: 'so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.' The narration of the title piece is restless, unsettled, moving backwards and forwards in time, but circling around opposite versions of two stories. Although the narrator's aunt says that the grandmother's attempt to hang herself was just 'to give Daddy a scare: the narrator tells the story from her mother's point of view as though she were omniscient and the story a self-contained whole because of its dark impact on their lives. 'There was a cloud, a poison, that had touched my mother's life. And when Igrieved my mother, I became part of it.' Unable to break into the hardened shape of this tale, the narrator alters a crucial detail in another story as an antidote to the poison. She places her father protectively beside her mother...