Narrative lines, narrative maps, and Alice Munro's fiction

Alice Munro's story "Haven" in the current New Yorker is an atypical entry from Alice the Great - mostly because of its focus and compression. What makes her stories so distinct and powerful is not their concentration but their expanse, the way she starts with a premise and then lets it meander along, building or discovering many connections over time - as if her stories are not narrative lines but narrative maps. Haven is more typical of the genre: focusing on one character and one "action," more or less - story of an early-teenage girl in Canada, where else?, in the 70s - tho as AM points out in the first paragraph not the 70s that most of us imagine or remember, much more uptight and provincial, left with her aunt and uncle as her adventuresome parents head off for a year on some kind of mission to Ghana. Though that action in itself raises eyebrows, we learn little about the parents - most of the story is about the aunt and uncle, the aunt seemingly completely devoted to her husband - the title refers to their home as being like a "haven" for the man of the house - but he, as we see moment by moment, is a cruel and bullying man: after one dinner, when wife asks how it was, he says, terrible, and goes off and eats a pb sandwich not because he's hungry but to drive home a point. Story comes to its climax when his sister, a musician, comes to town, he doesn't like her, wife entertains her anyway, when husband finds out he goes into one of his ridiculous snits - this time eating beans out of a can more or less. All told, it's a very powerful sketch of a totally unlikable man - though he's the beloved doctor in his small community, so what does that tell you? - but there isn't as much content, as many surprises, as many quirky moments in this as in most other Munro stories.