Dear Life
By Alice Munro 
(Knopf)

She is regularly paired with Chekhov. In 2004, Jonathan Franzen suggested she might be “the best fiction writer now working in North America.” In his introduction to the 2012 edition of “The Best American Short Stories,” Tom Perrotta states that she “looms over this year’s collection” as the “master” who has “expanded our sense of what stories can do.”

All true, and all reinforced by the just-published “Dear Life,” Alice Munro’s 13th collection of short stories.

But before turning to them, it’s worth focusing on the four compelling pieces that conclude “Dear Life,” individually named but given the collective title of “Finale.” Munro introduces them by telling us they “are not quite stories” but rather “a separate unit,” “autobiographical in feeling,” that “are the first and last ― and the closest ― things I have to say about my own life.”

Readers of a quasi-autobiographical collection like “The View from Castle Rock” (2006) might raise a skeptical eyebrow at this claim. But it is nevertheless true that these new snapshots tell us a great deal ― not just about Munro and her parents, but also about Munro’s stories.

Within “Finale,” we meet a defiantly independent young woman ― worshipped by the still-younger Alice ― who is killed in her prime. We watch Alice’s father, “whaling” away at a spirited Alice in an effort to beat “the unkindness out of me.” We see that same father dreaming of a better life and a different woman, knowing neither one will ever come.

Most of all, we spend time with Munro’s mother ― archetype for a figure we first encountered in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” (1968) ― who naively “thought that she and my father were going to transform themselves into a different sort of people,” and who turns brittle and narrow as she is slowly destroyed by disease and disappointment.

The 10 stories preceding “Finale” involve similarly divided people, desperately wanting more from life but also ashamed of that need and sure it will ― and should ― be punished. “Getting or not getting it,” as one of Munro’s characters said in “The Moons of Jupiter” (1978), “you will be to blame.”

In “Dear Life,” the seekers include two young mothers, each abandoning ostensibly fine but boring marriages; in different ways, both are punished for their transgressions ― as are the young daughters who rebel once they suspect what their mothers are doing (“To Reach Japan” and “Gravel”).

Other stories feature women who muster the courage to ask for more ― often from emotionally stunted men who can’t find it within themselves to be equally brave.

In “mundsen,” a young and impressionable schoolteacher gives her heart to an older doctor, as emotionally cold as the northern Ontario sanitarium in which they both work.

In “Pride,” an aging, still-single woman seeks intimacy from an equally lonely man with a harelip; obsessed with his deformity and convinced that nobody could possibly love him, he wonders how he could ever “admit that I was wishing for something I hadn’t got.”

In “Train,” the longest story in the collection, a man who was damaged as a child and who is repulsed by sex continually runs from people when they try to get close to him. “Things could be locked up,” he tells himself. “It only took some determination.” As we see in a story like “Haven,” there is something alluring about such lockup; battening the hatches ensures we’ll ride out the storm.

But a refusal to set sail for fear of life’s tempests also leaves one stranded in dry dock, until it is too late.

Like the 81-year-old Munro, many of the characters here are older, and they’re often very aware of time. The most perceptive learn the lesson each of these stories teaches: Life is indeed dear and therefore not to be wasted ― reason enough to spend one’s days reading and rereading Munro’s magnificent stories. 

(MCT)