Go ask Alice - two atypical Munro stories

Two more adjacent stories - each quite long - in Alice Munro's 1996 Selected Stories, each from the mid 1980s as she was just emerging as a New Yorker staple and by that means as a world-known author - The Progress of Love and Lichen - and in these you can see Munro, with the freedom the New Yorker apparently afforded her, pushing the limits (the publishing limits) of the story form, writing longer and more complex narratives that verge on the novella or even the novel (not in length but in incident and effect). Yet these two stories are in some ways atypical of Munro's work. For one thing, neither feels particularly "Canadian," or in fact tied to any one geographic place; almost all of Munro's best fiction does feel as if it has grown out of her postage stamp of native soil - these two stories could, with the necessary changes, take place anywhere. Progress is, for Munro, particularly melodramatic, centering on an incident in which a mother fakes a suicide almost, apparently, deliberately to shake up a wayward child; Lichen is the opposite, in a way - very nondramatic, at first, a dating couple go on a visit to the guy's ex, with surprisingly few of the expected tensions of jealousy or regret, and then the guy does something really odd - in a casual conversation with a neighbor he shows a pornographic snapshot of a young woman he's seeing on the side - someone much younger, in fact, and from a different world, a cocktail waitress I think he said - clearly a relationship bound for serious trouble, and a stark contrast to the genteel partnership he has with current lover and way different from his ex-wife, an earth mother, independent, almost willfully unattractive woman. Part of the story involves a visit to her now-blind father in a nursing home - just so hard to reconcile the man's conciliatory behavior toward his ex and her family with his bizarre obsession - the right word, much like the Blue Angel, say - with the woman whose picture he actually flaunts. Lichen is darker, sexier, and more uneven than most other Munro stories - it's not a path she pursued, but it's interesting to see her in these two pieces figuring out some possibilities.