That qualities that make Alice Munro one of the greats of our time

Leaving Maverly is the latest story from Alice Munro in The New Yorker, along with the good news that she has another collection due out next year - this story shows some new direction in her work, as well as the qualities that make Alice the Great one of the two greatest short-story writers of our time: We have the familiar Canadian smalltown postwar (i.e., late 40s early 50s) setting (though less emphasis on the Canadiana than usual) and we have the Munro quality of an ambling plot that develops and finds is shape as it moves along. First few paragraphs describe a young girl who has to leave her job in a movie theater and recommends a replacement, and the crotchety theater owner is skeptical but hires the girl. From the first 10 paragraphs or so, we think the story may be about the girl leaving the job, or more likely about the theater owner - then we begin to learn more about the new hire and we think it will be about her, and then we learn that she needs someone (a police officer, as it turns out) to escort her home, and the story turns out to be, primarily, about him and his invalid wife: we learn the whole back story of their courtship and marriage, and then we follow them across quite a swath of time, as is typical of many recent Munro stories. The young theater ticket taker leaves town and from time to time crosses paths with the police officer - finally seeing him when he's working in a hospital where his wife is mortally ill. OK, that's all pretty familiar Munro territory - but this story, also like some of her more recent, is quite compressed and tells a lot (not enough, perhaps) by indirection. The police officer is kind of dull and mundane; the most interesting character and the one who really goes through conflict and changes is the young girl, who is raised in a strict household, rebels, joins the counterculture, divorces, in the end oddly comes onto the police officer - what has changed her? What has happened in her life? Most writers would make the story about her - but Munro always defies expectations. In this case, the story is not one of her greatest - it feels as if there's a lot of empty space in this story - but it's a precis of her late writing style and of the decisions and chances that she always takes.