The Last Book I Loved: Runaway

I came late to the Alice Munro party but now that I’m here I’m planted and staying.  This book floored me—the first story, yes, good, interesting, intriguing, but it was story #2, “Chance” that handled storytelling and character and mystery so fluidly and with such freshness that I felt like a real idiot for all the wrong assumptions I’d had about Munro in the past.  For some dumb reason I thought she’d be much more straightforward than she is.  Wrong!  It was my wise friend Mia who kept shoving the stories in my face and telling me to read them even though I was sure they weren’t for me. Munro seems impossible to categorize—it’s realism but it’s heightened, but also it’s not heightened, it’s just a true report; there’s mystery and spaciousness everywhere and yet everything she’s dealing with is made up of our most basic and familiar nuts and bolts loves and hates.  Her stories take unusual turns with a true lighthandedness, and they refuse to make anything (or anybody) simple, and she bends and stretches time as only fiction can.  I want to read more but I’m still circling around this book, poring over it in my head, unwilling to move on yet, struck.