A master at the peak of perfection

SHORT STORIES: MARY MORRISSYreviews New Selected StoriesBy Alice Munro Chatto & Windus, 434pp. £18.99

WHEN ALICE MUNRO was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, in 2009, the judges described her work as “practically perfect”. The qualification rankled; doesn’t practically in this sense mean almost but not quite? I prefer to see Munro’s 40-year writing career as perfection in practice.

Munro is widely celebrated, particularly among writers. She has the dubious accolade of being a writer’s writer (usually shorthand for being difficult and inacessible). Her work is read and studied for its luminous, exact prose and the deceptively loose way in which she crafts her narratives. Despite this – and world-wide literary recognition – Munro’s work still has the air of a well-kept secret. The reason? Her 13 published works have been confined exclusively to the short story. Few writers can point to a vocation so single-minded.

It is 12 years since her first selected stories appeared. This second volume represents stories from the five collections she has produced since 1997. Munro’s publisher describes this volume as a masterclass in the form – and it’s correct. The future of the short story right now is uncertain – isn’t it always? – but the tendency is towards reduction: flash fiction, the phone-app story. In contrast, Munro’s stories have lengthened and deepened. She has always been more interested in the discursive possibilities of the form rather than its brevity. Her stories are both compacted and leggy, sprawling over lifetimes, and sometimes generations. Epiphanies come not singly but in shoals.

There is not a dark corner of the short story Munro has not colonised. Collections of linked stories were the Noughties trend in short fiction, but Munro had been there and done that. Her Lives of Girls and Women, a cycle of stories featuring the coming-of-age of Del Jordan, came out in 1971 at the very start of her career. In one of the stories in that collection, Del, a tyro writer, describes her ambitions: "I wanted . . . every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, every pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting." It is a mission statement that could be applied to Munro herself. Five years ago, just when you thought she'd got to the end of her formal inventiveness, The View from Castle Rocktook her in a new direction. This is a blend of autobiography, memoir and historical fiction in which she reimagines the perilous journey her Scottish forbears took to the New World in the 1850s and their early harrowing years as settlers.

Her canvas is narrow – small-town Ontario and its hinterland – her characters unremarkable: practical, bookish women, troubled by ambition and desire. Her 2001 collection, featured here, entitled Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, gives a clue. Betrayal, in all its forms, is a predominant theme. There is nothing emotionally narrow about Munro's work. She teasingly leads the reader to expect one thing and then, according to Eudora Welty's dictum that endings should be both a surprise and inevitable, nudges you insidiously into darkness, sublimation, unsettling recklessness.

Take Chancefrom her 2004 collection, Runaway. Julie is a young woman travelling on a train across Canada. On the journey an older man hazards a conversation with her, but she brushes him off, finding his company too needy, and then is horrified to discover that, shortly after talking to her, the man kills himself by jumping off the train. Was her brusqueness, her rude refusal to be drawn into casual conversation, the last straw for this lonely stranger, she wonders.

For most writers that would be the central action of the story, but Munro backgrounds the shocking suicide, concentrating instead on the ripples that swell out from this one chance encounter, left hauntingly offstage but lingering in the reader's mind like an unsavoury thought. Several stories in Runawaydip back into Julie's life, and they are reproduced here, weaving a subtle web of consequence and creating the accumulated heft of a novel.

There are mysterious, open-ended stories too, such as Deep-Holes, from her 2009 collection, Too Much Happiness,about Sally's son, Kent, saved from certain death as a child after a fall into a cave, who goes missing as a young adult. After many years' absence, the family rediscovers him by chance living as a down-and-out happily renouncing all his worldly goods. Cue a prodigal-son narrative. But, no, what emerges is a tale of ambiguous motherhood (Sally's) and a family who have sealed over the wound of his death-like absence. And there are sexual shocks in the most unlikely places. In The Bear Came Over the Mountain– made into a terrific film, Away From Her, directed by Sarah Polley and starring Julie Christie – Grant, once-philandering husband of Fiona, pimps himself out to acquire a companion for his wife confined to a nursing home suffering from dementia.

Now 80, Munro is still writing, despite having announced her retirement in 2006. For the avid fan, this collection offers the chance to reread beloved stories in a new configuration. The editors’ choice is perfectly pitched. Gathering Munro’s later work in one volume may give the stories a more sombre resonance than originally intended, but that’s all to the good. If you have never read Munro, you couldn’t start in a better place. This is not just a master writer at the peak of perfection: it is vintage Munro.

Mary Morrissy is a novelist, short-story writer and writer-in-residence at University College Dublin