The Progress of Love [antikvár]

Introduction by Richard Ford I never sit down to read an Alice Munro story unless I'm sure I have time to read it all. No hauling The Progress of Love along to the dentist or the department of motor vehicles in case the wait's long. Short stories, of course, are written to be read in single sittings (novellas are said to be perfect for medium-length train journeys). Most short stories stop making sense, and certainly stop making the sense their authors intended, by being sliced into bits, interrupted by the telephone, kids getting in from school, by the leaf blower in the hands of our next-door neighbor. By sleep. Still, we do it—knowing we shouldn't, knowing we're traitors to art, frivolous dabblers. We restart in the middle, then can't remember who "Aunt Betsy" was, or if "Jonathan" had died, or whether he and "Sabrina" divorced before she married "Terry" and moved to Halifax, and whether "Roscoe" was a dog or a cat. Or else we don't remember when it all occurred (was it the 50s or the 60s?). We reach the end {if we reach the end), and the whole thing seems a muddle and far away, the characters shadowy, their lives flat. Maybe we'll try it again early next Sunday morning, when it's quiet. Maybe we even wonder what all the fuss is about, since it really didn't seem as good a story as all that. This is the cautionary part of the introduction, applicable to all short stories and all readers, but pertinent to no contemporary story writer in English as much as to Alice Munro, whose extraordinary collection you hold in your hand. And not because Ms. Munro's stories are dense (they are occasionally dense), or because they're IX