I read this collection slowly because I wanted to give these stories time to settle. I never read any two stories back to back in the same day, and usually took a couple days for each. In every story I found characters that I felt deeply and needed time to sit with them.
These stories produce such balanced complexity that I found it hard to cheer too hard for or against anyone, even -- or especially -- primary characters. There is deep sympathy or at least some measure of understanding here for even the edge characters.
After thinking about the book for a week or so and starting to write these notes, it occurs to me that every story here features somewhere a young women's perspective on marriage. And the title really works when I think about this collection that way.
Here are the things I want to remember about this book:
1) The title story is the first 75 pages. If there seems to be any ambiguity about whether the bad woman was telling the truth, and whether the good woman, dear Enid, was willing to live with a hard lie, then read again the first two pages about the optometrist box in the museum. Its hard to understand what this detail means on the first read and it makes the stillness and summer dusk in the final scene feel more free and more dark if that's possible.
2) Jakarta is about memory and aging and the word that sticks with me is "fading". Kent and Sonje are such broken and un-matched conversational partners, revealingly misremembering stories of hard moments in parallel marriages that no longer exist.
3) Cortes Island sets a young woman who is just starting married life against an older woman with a painful, horrible past that she's fled. The older woman's stroke-crippled monster of a husband becomes the object of the young woman's tenderness and curiosity when she takes a job attending and reading to him for a few hours every afternoon. And that caretaking job and the monster-man's revelation have a deep impact on this proper young woman, and for many years the memory of that crippled man drives the dark side of her erotic dreams -- dreams without decency or romance -- until, she says, "I used him up I suppose, like we use up the dead."
4) Save the Reaper looks at a young woman's family through the eyes of her divorced mother, and the irresponsibility and jeopardy that is both terrifying and exciting -- and that drives the plot. This recklessness I suspect is probably the reason for the daughter's desire for distance.
5) The Children Stay seemed very autobiographical to me. It was the story of a young mother that just walks away from her family, young husband and two young girls. Its set in the location where I think the author initiated her own divorce. The story doesn't defend the mother's actions but it lays out somewhat dispassionately the bones of a persistent unhappiness. It shows how she arrives at what looks like a snap decision. I remember reading Munro quoted as saying "divorce is good for women and bad for families". This story is about that.
6) Rich As Stink follows a pre-teen girl suspended between divorced parents, visiting her mother who is having some kind of affair with her younger married boss. The girl is close to all the adults and they are all trying to protect her from the messiness of their lives but unsuccessfully and almost tragically.
7) Before The Change is a story of relationship conflict and release. The key story threads connect to the social problem of abortion in mid 20th century rural Canada. The story conceit is a set of letters a young woman writes to her ex-fiancé from her family home where she's staying with her old doctor father, his mysterious housekeeper, and a collection of houseplants that are "not flourishing and not dying". The end of the story connects all the threads in the narrator's head after a harmless fall cross-country skiing. This story is very much about finding peace, letting go.
8) My Mother's dream is told from the point of view of a grown woman remembering -- impossibly -- her first few months of infancy and the impact she had as a baby on her mother and her father's complex family in the wake of their favorite son's death.
When I think about how much I loved each of these stories I suppose one measure of my affection could be could be the amount I've written here about each.. where The Love of a Good Woman, Cortes Island, The Children Stay, and Before the Change are probably my favorites of these beauties right now.
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