“Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness, as people long ago stopped judging Pritchett’s – her reputation is like a good address … Munro is a great realist, and her powers come from her sense of the way in which communities – especially small, socially anxious, limited ones – construct and guard their reality … occasionally one feels that she makes things easier for herself by limiting her canvas to small societies in smaller times. Often, her stories move around the disruption brought to a community by an exotic outsider. At such moments, the exoticism or danger of the interloper can seem unconvincing or uninteresting, because Munro appears to have loaded the dice by making the invaded community so unexotic to begin with … The prose of these stories is not lavish: it is intelligently starved; not sticky with metaphor, or crowded with detail … She has an acute eye for comic detail, in particular the comedy of fastidiousness.”
—James Wood, The London Review of Books, May 8, 1997
Read more of James’ reviews here
