Quiet lives of desperation - in Alice Munro's stories

Pretty much universal plaudits from all last night for Alice Munro's Dear Life, even if grudgingly from those (BR) who don't particularly like short stories - surprising how many don't, who find them unsatisfactory, without the complex emotional engagement of the novel, and literally "over too soon." But in our discussion we did touch on the novelistic qualities of Munro's stores - more so in some of her previous collections, I would argue - and talked about her unusual narrative flow and how her stories tend to "pivot" (RR's term) on a single moment: actually most short stories by all authors tend to concentrate on a single action or image, but the pivoting feels unusual in Munro because her stories have the narrative scope of much longer feature while maintain the compression of mood and incidence of the story form: for example Amundsen in which a life story hinges on or pivots about a single moment of decision by Dr. Fox, when he decides to back out of the marriage. Lots of events leading up to this and following from it - as in a novel - but it's the single event that defines this as a unified piece of literature. Lots of talk also about the horrible men in her stories, and about the social climbers, mostly men - but also AM's mother, as she describes in the 4 semi-autobiographical pieces at the end. Also issues of the many Protestant sects in these communities and how they determine a social hierarchy of a sort, and also discussion about childless couples  - and about the one story that doesn't fit the mold, the wife-runaway story To Reach Japan that opens the collection and portrays the husband as basically OK though dull and the wife as reckless and callous. She suffers no consequences, at least not within the confines of the story - but in Gravel we see how the one moment of indecision - the very young girl failing to rouse her mother to maybe save drowning sister - permeated her entire adult life. Can she ever forgive herself? In the last sentence of the book, Munro suggests, states, that yes, we do it all the time - but I'm not sure her stories actually prove that point. Munro finds absolution perhaps in her writing - she talks about how as a child she became known in the family for her funny accounts of things happening at school - but others may not have that outlet - and we sense that many people in her stories, in these remote and cold Canadian towns (none take place, in this collection, in Vancouver or Toronto, the two poles of many of he stories and of her life), are leading the quiet lives of desperation.