Alice Munro's unusual narrative style

Another set of mirror-image stories in Alice Munro's collection Dear Life, both of which appeared in the New Yorker and now collected and with, I think, some revisions and additions: Gravel is like the first story in the collection, To Reach Japan, brought to a higher pitch. We again see a typical Munro "heroine," a 30ish woman with a few children and with an artistic bent (or pretensions) who leaves her conventional but loyal and faithful husband for another man or, more often, just for a dash at freedom (really the same thing). In this case, the woman takes her two daughters (she's pregnant with a 3rd child) and moves into a trailer in the countryside with her hippie-ish, narcisstic new boyfriend, devastating the husband left behind. But - unlike in To Reach Japan - she pays a huge price: in both stories a child is endangered because the mother leaves her alone while having sex with new squeeze; in this story, the child drowns, which leads to guilt and ruination for a lifetime, particularly for the narrator of the story, the younger sister who couldn't save the drowning girl. Very powerful story. The bookend to Gravel is Haven, about a teenage girl left in care of her childless aunt and uncle for a year while her parents pursue missionary work in Ghana. Again, issue of abandoned child - though child not at all vulnerable - as parents (in this case as a couple) go to find themselves. The issue here focuses not on the girl but on the aunt and uncle - here the aunt is completely subjected to the will of her overbearing, dominant, cruel husband. He's not an abuser outright of anything, but he can imposes his will on her in every possible way: she's a crushed woman, and doesn't even know it. She makes a feeble attempt to befriend some neighbors, in part by inviting her husband's estranged sister over to the house, which infuriates husband - hard to believe she would actually do this, knowing him, but maybe there was a sense in which she wanted to provoke him, perhaps to break up their marriage? Unfortunately, the story wobbles its way toward an unlikely conclusion when the sister dies and they all go to a funeral. Munro is well known for her unconventional narratives, not always bringing them to a sharp conclusion, but this one seems to have spun off the rails. Another story in the collection is the excellent Leaving Maverly, a good late example of Munro's unusual narrative style: the focus of the story shifts several times in the first pages, as we're not sure until well into it who will be the protagonist and who will be a peripheral or marginal character. Gradually, we see that the story is about the small-town policeman and his ill wife (another one of Munro's entwined, childless couples), particularly in regard to his relation with a young woman in town who eventually runs away from her very strict parents, then returns to town - all over a long period of time. Story would be stronger, in my view, if Munro hadn't surprised us so much with the young girl's character - she doesn't even hint, when she introduces the girl, at her rebellious and impulsive nature; also sory would have been stronger if there were no final meeting between girl and now-widowed policeman; that scene feels unlikely and forced into the picture.