The Progress of Love

Rating:
Summary: Injured people, small lights of happiness.
Review: Alice Munro is such a fine writer that she can take some fifty-odd characters over the course of a story collection and make them seem like various aspects of a complex and sensitive personality. These stories are careful and elegant, and writers will note Munro's idiosyncratically beautiful use of unexpected adjectives. But even without such wonderful writing, her stories would speak for themselves: her characters live life directly, simply, and often painfully, and they have more feeling than they can express. Munro does it for them. This collection includes "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink," one of the most moving stories I can imagine. Read it and weep.

Rating:
Summary: Injured people, small lights of happiness.
Review: Alice Munro is such a fine writer that she can take some fifty-odd characters over the course of a story collection andmake them seem like various aspects of a complex and sensitive personality. These stories are careful and elegant, and writers will note Munro's idiosyncratically beautiful use of unexpected adjectives. But even without such wonderful writing, her stories would speak for themselves: her characters live life directly, simply, and often painfully, and they have more feeling than they can express. Munro does it for them. This collection includes "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink," one of the most moving stories I can imagine. Read it and weep.

Rating:
Summary: Genius
Review: Alice Munro is, by my reckoning, the greatest short story writer of our time. Her collection, The Progress of Love, is ample proof. I recommend her work with trepidation to aspiring short story writers because her writing is intimidatingly exquisite. Charles Baxter or Lorrie Moore could profit from a session in the batting cage with Munro, but for most everybody else, it would be like taking your Tee-Ball Leaguer for a hitting tutorial with Ted Williams.

What's so good about Munro's writing? Foremost is her precision. The center of the short story writer's craft is economy. It's very difficult to find a word that doesn't advance both story and theme in Munro's work. The reader finds himself stopping to ponder passages not because they're opaque but because they are so powerfully rendered and so intricately woven. I've taught "Monsieur Les Deux Chapeaux" for seven years, and Ross's moment on the bridge never fails to transport me and my students. I don't expect to find an end to my thought about this moment or the story itself. It will unquestionably remain a short story by which I measure all others.

Rating:
Summary: Genius
Review: Alice Munro is, by my reckoning, the greatest short story writer of our time. Her collection, The Progress of Love, is ample proof. I recommend her work with trepidation to aspiring short story writers because her writing is intimidatingly exquisite. Charles Baxter or Lorrie Moore could profit from a session in the batting cage with Munro, but for most everybody else, it would be like taking your Tee-Ball Leaguer for a hitting tutorial with Ted Williams.

What's so good about Munro's writing? Foremost is her precision. The center of the short story writer's craft is economy. It's very difficult to find a word that doesn't advance both story and theme in Munro's work. The reader finds himself stopping to ponder passages not because they're opaque but because they are so powerfully rendered and so intricately woven. I've taught "Monsieur Les Deux Chapeaux" for seven years, and Ross's moment on the bridge never fails to transport me and my students. I don't expect to find an end to my thought about this moment or the story itself. It will unquestionably remain a short story by which I measure all others.

Rating:
Summary: Very solid introduction
Review: Mid-period Munro, when she began in earnest to explore a talent for expansiveness. The title story is as fine as anything she's written. The final pages reap deliciously what the story's juxtaposed timelines and plots have set up. You walk away from the story shaking your head, sighing, aching. Not as fine a collection as The Moons of Jupiter, also out of the same period in her career, but still hard to beat by another writer in the medium. It seems short stories have waited for Munro for too long, and we are too privileged to be readers in her lifetime.