By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
Alice Munro - queen of Canadian letters and winner of 2009's Man Booker International Prize for her body of work — returns with Too Much Happiness, a collection of 10 new stories. At 78, Munro can still teach younger writers how to write marvelously muscular short fiction. These stories have more plot and energy than most novels.
There's a gritty tabloid edge to some of these tales. The opening story, "Dimensions," involves a chambermaid named Doree who is hiding a terrible secret about her three children. But the real mystery is her incarcerated, much older husband's emotional grip on her — a truly toxic smart-women, foolish-choices scenario that Munro perfectly captures.
Famed for her skill in describing women's interior lives, Munro creates a bizarre gothic scenario in "Wenlock Edge" involving nudity, hubris, an adventuress and a really creepy old man with a taste for English poetry.
Expect no sentimentality about mothers, fathers and their children. "Deep-Holes" illustrates how a family's internal fissures and simmering resentments play out through the decades, beginning with an ill-fated picnic.
In "Free Radicals," Munro goes full gothic in a tale of an aging widow with cancer who allows into her home a man who claims he needs to look at her fuse box. Menacing is putting it mildly. And the twist? The old lady escapes being murdered by describing her adulterous past.
The birth of a boy with a facial birthmark sets his mother and father against each other in "Face." Yet the father's cruelty makes the outside world far easier for the boy to eventually navigate.
The title of the collection comes from the last and longest of the stories, "Too Much Happiness." It tells the story of a Russian mathematician named Sophia Kovalevsky as she journeys through 19th-century Europe searching for her place in the world. With this collection of surprising short stories, Munro once again displays the fertility of her imagination and her craftsmanship as a writer.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2009-12-30-alice-munro happiness_N.htm?csp=Entertainment
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