The two pillars of Munro's work - represented in 2 stories

Two side by side stories in Alice Munro's 1996 Selected Stories can serve as the twin pillars of Munro's work, or actually of her lifelong subject matter. The first (both are from the mid 1970s), Material, is about a woman in her somewhat bland but content 2nd marriage to an engineer, v. devoted to her, who reflects back on her first marriage - her first husband was an irresponsible artist/poet, they were poor grad students of the like, living in a rented flat somewhere in Vancouver, and they got much pleasure from speculating on the life of the woman in the basement apartment who appears to have been a prostitute - this "material" later becomes the subject matter of her ex's most recent fiction - he's now gone on to be a well-known writer, who chooses, as she so acidly notes, to romanticize his past, as judging by the lies and exaggerations on his author's blurb. This story very typical of a certain kind of Munro work: the highly intelligent but overshadowed wife, submitting herself to the whims and power of her husband - either an artist or a dull plain vanilla type - and knowing or at least believing that she is a creative soul and that she needs to break free - these stories often set in the literary or academic circles of Vancouver or, more rarely, Toronto. Munro's skewering of literary-academic pretensions in this story - the old, egotistical writers with the cloud of admiring women surrounding them - is particularly delicious. The other story shows the other side of Munro's life, and of Munro's material: Royal Beatings is about a young girl growing up in poverty in a remote Ontario town, in this case sometime in the 1930s it seems - this story involves some severe abuse (alluded to in the title) by the stepmother and the feckless father - more painful and declasse that most Munro stories, but it does - like so many - capture the sadness and the intimacy and the narrow horizons of Canadian rural life - and like so many Munro stories this one is told mostly from a long vantage by a mature narrator and ends with a quick flash forward to the present - characters crossing paths strangely and unexpectedly, often in a city (usually, as in this case, in Toronto).