From the lives of women

Publishers often claim that short stories have limited appeal and that readers prefer the more extended involvement that a novel offers. Such a view is very short-sighted, considering the critical respect, as well as enduring popular appeal, of master short story writers such as Alice Munro, William Trevor, John McGahern, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, John Updike, Peter Taylor, V.S. Pritchett or John Cheever. All of these writers have proved that a great short story can more than hold its own against a great novel; indeed, one need look no further this year than to Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, published recently in a pamphlet-sized volume.

Of the writers listed above - and it is high company - the Canadian Alice Munro is unique. So widely has she been praised that further acclaim seems redundant. Again, however, with her outstanding eighth collection, The Love of a Good Woman (Chatto, £14.99 in UK), she demonstrates the deceptive range she commands in stories which appear limited to the small lives of women, but which transcend the ordinary by being so much bigger; these tales are as unsettling as they are thoughtful. Munro is intuitive and wise rather than knowing; her subtle technique permits her to stand at a distance from a story, entering it usually at a midway point from whence she works her magic, fleshing it out, developing points, nudging sub-plots and apparent self-contained scenes towards centre stage. The long title story here is a good example of this process. A chance reference to a local museum in which a set of optometrist's instruments feature amongst far older artefacts, such as butter churns and apple peelers, eventually proves the link in the mysterious slow death of a bitter young wife.

A small community comes to life as Munro recreates a sense of its daily life. Into this world she introduces Enid, a kindly girl with a flair for nursing. Her father, however, as he lies dying in hospital, decides that it is not the career for her, yet refuses to elaborate. It is a typical Munro device. The old man's reticence speaks volumes, not merely for him but for the world which Munro is evoking. It is left to Enid's mother to explain his aversion: "He's got an idea that nursing makes a woman coarse." So Enid becomes a home carer. Time passes and she proves invaluable. Of the many people she helps is Mrs Quinn who faces death with more anger than fear. In time, the narrative returns to the instruments in the museum.

In "Cortes Island", the narrator revisits her early married life in a tiny basement bed-sit in which her privacy is repeatedly invaded by the meddlesome mother of her easy-going landlord. Mrs Gorrie takes to delivering relentless lectures about marriage: "She told me things that had to do with my future, the house she assumed I would have, and the more she talked the more I felt an iron weight on my limbs." She resists Mrs Gorrie's infiltration with predictable consequences. Another narrator attempts to accept the failure of a romance by returning home and assisting her doctor father. In "My Mother's Dream", the finest among several strong stories, the narrator relives her mother's private hell as a languid, inept young widow in the first days of motherhood and trapped by her dead husband's family.

Munro recreates entire lives, worlds in which emotional battles and life experiences have been fought out, such as in "Save the Reaper" when grandmother realises she has placed herself and her grandchildren at danger by taking them to a house she visited in her youth.

In contrast with Munro's calm, deliberate, slowly unfolding dramas with a sting, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America (Faber & Faber, £9.99 in UK), in which vivid snapshots of lives in chaos catch the mood of a given moment. Late in the closing story of this wonderful collection, one of the characters says to herself: "Time. What a racket." This tone of perceptive exasperation runs through Moore's work. A thrice divorced man announces: "No more weddings . . . From here on in, I'm just going to go out there, find a woman I really don't like very much, and give her a house."

Even at her most compassionate, there is always a streak of sharp, often black, humour - Moore wasn't born in New York for nothing. Her characters are usually women, usually young, if no longer quite as young as they had been, who have made mistakes - well, more like cataclysmic errors of judgement. Author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), Moore is a naturally humorous, humane writer whose exact images are as original as they are funny - "on the ledge, a jack-o-lantern she had carved for Halloween had rotted, melted, froze, and now looked like a collapsed basketball - one that she might have been saving for sentimental reasons, one from the big game!" The fact that the owner of the decaying pumpkin is a depressed actress whose career to date has been confined to taking off her clothes, and who is now holed up in a progressively filthy hotel room listening to self-esteem tapes and dreaming of romance, grimly shows that no matter how manic the comedy, the underlying tone is of sad resignation.

A consistently betrayed wife compares her husband's lovers to ballerinas floating through the air "or dandelion down, all of them sudden and fleeting". Though suffering from cancer, she agrees to move to a derelict house. As she says to her slow-talking Southern husband, "Speak more quickly! I don't have long to live." In "Terrific Mother", Martin asks Adrienne to marry him after she has accidently killed her friend's baby. They travel to Europe and live in an academic commune of sorts. She is restlessly unhappy but prefers the ice cream in Italy to the American variety which looks like "babies had attacked it with their cookies".

This is another excellent performance from one of the best of the youngish US writers. Lorrie Moore's uncanny reading of human nature remains deftly surefooted and unusually moving.