Touble with titles but none with closing line: Alice Munro

Another pair of stories in Alice Munro's "Too Much Happiness" show yet another side of her work. These two, Face and Some People, are written in the first person, which is a bit unusual for her late work (though there are other examples). Face is particularly unusual, however, in that it's first-person male-narrator. Both of these stories center on one traumatic incident from childhood and its lifetime repercussions, and they're notable in that the incident is one of shame, discomfort, and confusion - not a great tragedy or personal catastrophe (rape, robbery, injury, death). In Face, a man disfigured by a birthmark, recalls when a childhood friend literally painted her face to look like him - in an act of solidarity, which all adults misunderstood as an act of cruelty, driving the young man further into isolation. In Some Women, the narrator recalls a summer job as an aide to a young man dying of leukemia and how she helped him perpetrate a scheme to gain some privacy and dignity. In both stories, the narrator looks back on the key incident from late in life and wonders how it may have changed life's course. The style is so deft and so quirky, the phasing so strange and unique, that these stories surpass the limitations of the genre. The narrators - like Munro, no doubt - are sharp and edgy, totally nonsentimental, with no self-pity and no remorse. If Munro has trouble with titles, which never do justice to her stories or her books, she has no trouble with closing lines, which almost always leave you breathless.