RaveThe MillionsHer writing continues in its understated mode, but the simplicity seems now to reflect an increased urgency, rather than a diminished capacity. There’s a kind of cut-the-crap quality to this latest batch of stories — material that might have once have taken up 20 pages she now deals with in a couple of sentences, unsentimentally, almost in passing ... the voice is newly sharpened, as if she were freshly aware of only having so many words remaining in her allotment ... It’s as if, after decades of plot trickery and composite characters, she longs to remove all the filters from her light, to show us the bare bulb. Here, finally, is the intelligence itself, the compassionate but merciless awareness that she has shone through all her hundreds of stories ... Munro, equipped with a head-lamp the likes of which we may never see again, continues to explore.
