THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 19, 1994 TAG: 9410190048
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
FICTION TELLS us how to live, but the stories of Canadian writer Alice Munro go beyond teaching by telling. They startle the reader into adding up and interpreting the fictional characters' accumulated experiences. From there, we may go on to sort the jumble of our own hard-earned lessons and achieve a conciliatory wisdom. But explanations behind life's accidents, mishaps, losses and mysteries - in fictional or real life - are never handed to us on a platter of neat resolutions.
In ``Open Secrets: Stories'' (Alfred A. Knopf, $23), her new collection, Munro explores mysteries without giving answers; often even the fictional narrator has little notion of what the story might mean.
``The Albanian Virgin'' tells of Lottar, a young Canadian woman who is touring remote mountains when her guide is shot in a blood feud. Days pass before she realizes that her past, her station, her problems mean nothing to her captors, the hairy, half-Christianized Ghegs.
Just as we are held captive by the woman's fate, the narrator announces: ``I heard this story in old St. Joseph's Hospital in Victoria from Charlotte, who was the sort of friend I had in my early days there.''
And we are transported to 1964 British Columbia and the modern problems of the narrator, a young woman who has fled marriage and opened a book shop in Victoria. We travel between 1920s Albania and 1960s Victoria quite a bit before the parallel stories symbolically converge, in the dogged persistence of stubborn, even irrational, love. The mystery is left up to the reader to decode. Alice Munro must have faith in her readers' abilities; she's right to have faith in her own.
In the title story, Maureen has married ``up,'' to an older, successful lawyer. But years later, she's paying a high price in secret humiliation, a private ritual of brutality demanded by her husband, after his partial recuperation from a stroke. Outside her ``safe'' house, there are open secrets and public mysteries, like the recent disappearance of obstreperous young Heather Bell on a camping trip.
The girl was reckless, everyone claims, as if she deserved an ominous fate. Yet Maureen can't help recalling her own secret recklessness, her vanished girlhood. (``To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc - that was the lost hope of girls.'') And gazing from the safety of her comfortable home, she witnesses a small gesture that prods her into a half-realization of the lost girl's fate. Something ``not startling until you think of trying to tell it.''
Here, physical appearances determine guilt and punishment, answers are partial and ambiguous, but even the uncertain lessons yielded are stunning to the reader who pays attention.
Other tales also puzzle over mysteries of time, love, death and the need for resolution to past injustice, if only a symbolic payback.
In ``Wilderness Outpost,'' a mail-order bride feigns madness and seeks sanctuary at the nearest ``gaol'' to save her life.
The older woman in ``Vandals'' stays married to an indifferent recluse she initially romanticized (``what she did think - and she knew that this was very regressive and bad form - was that some women, women like herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them. For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?'') And the story's younger woman rids herself of a childhood secret by taking vengeance on her long-time ``benefactors.''
In ``A Real Life,'' a woman whose life has been disappointing persuades an eccentric friend to marry a wealthy stranger, only gradually realizing at what cost to herself.
Other stories unfold through conversations, confessions, letters, songs, poems, clippings; most span a whole lifetime, needing that scope to re-create the learning process, showing that those who persevere are rewarded - not with traditional prizes so much as with the wisdom to understand that good exists, even when it's not readily identified. Those who choose to drop out early lose big; they lose their only real defense against terminal despair. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern Shore,
where she is at work on her second novel.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Alice Munro explores mysteries without giving answers.
by CNB