Re-reading Alice Munro

In prep for book group meeting tonight right here re-read two of the Alice Munro stories in Dear Life, and of course each time I read or re-read one of hers I see more elements and patterns and ideas (and sometimes flaws) - as Charles May, excellent blogger on the short story, will note - he always reads them several times before posting whereas I tend to jump right into the pool preserving my first, sometimes ill-formed, reactions (this blog is a record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading - not a work of scholarship or criticism). Read Amundsen (title refers to the remote Ontario town that is the setting for most of the story - Munro's only weakness as a writer, in my opinion, is her utter lack of sense for effective titles) and Haven (title refers to the quaint and oppressive idea that a man's home is his haven - and a wife's duty is to make it so). In both stories a woman recalls an experience with a cultured, intelligent, professional man who is absolutely hideous, even monstrous - at least to those who know him best (to outsiders, he's almost a hero). Both men are doctors. But the narrators are different (though as is typical of Munro they are looking back from a long vantage on an episode of their youth): one is a virginal, somewhat sheltered teacher working in a remote TB sanitarium during WWII; the nurse begins a relationship with her boss, the chief physician, who lords it over her, is strict and mean, pretty much declares that they will get married, then weirdly dumps her just before they are to go into the town offices to sign the marriage papers. Horrible man - and the clear but unspoken sense is that he has sexual issues: his bossiness and assertiveness about the relationship suggest it's a compensation; perhaps he goes on in life to discover his homosexuality, but Munro doesn't enlighten us on this point. In Haven, the narrator recalls being a teenager left in care of her childless aunt and uncle as her parents go off to Ghana on a Christian mission; on this reading, the religious themes struck me much more, though I'm not sure of the import: Munro puts forth various doctrines - the narrator's parents are Unitarian liberals, her older brothers joke about being atheist of Muslim, her uncle was raised Anglican but is now in the more post United church (he's a climber for sure), her aunt - whom the uncle despises - stayed Anglican, and the story concludes with her funeral service in a seldom-used Anglican church, a family servant is in a "weird" sect that distributes pamphlets around town - perhaps JW?, but not defined. The uncle, with his post religions, behaves with unfathomable cruelty to his totally dominated wife - he's mean, insulting, full of himself, but everyone in town loves him as a great and selfless doctor. Not sure what to make of the service at the end, that he tries to control - as he controls so much else - but seems to run amok.