Heart-Catching

By Patricia Blake

THE MOONS OF JUPITER by Alice Munro Knopf; 233 pages; $12.95

Some writers have voices so distinctive that no matter how traditional the form they write in, the identity of the author can scarcely fail to be recognized after a brief passage. Alice Munro belongs in that rare company; from her naturalistic, classically composed short stories there rises a melodic line that catches at the heart with its freshness.

Munro's originality is all the more striking because her subject is ordinariness. The stories in this collection and in earlier volumes of fiction (Lives of Girls and Women, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You) are situated in backwaters of Munro's native Canada, places from which any author might have fled long ago, literally and literarily. Instead, Munro still lives in Clinton, Ont, and, in her prose, dwells with contagious affection on the Saskatchewan plain and on the poky small towns and industrial cities of western Ontario. Hanratty, for instance, is "such a narrow place, crude without the compensations of the wilderness, cramped without any urban variety or life."

Her characters are farmers, schoolteachers, librarians, telephone linemen. If one of them breaks out briefly from the boundaries of place and station, he--and particularly she--is usually fated to come back. In Accident, the would-be musician Frances returns to Hanratty, after a spell at a conservatory, to direct a high school glee club and play the organ in a church on Sunday. When she falls in love with a married science teacher, they can find no better places to make love than on the floor of the science supply closet.

Frances thinks nobody knows. "It is in imagining her affair to be a secret that Frances shows a lack of small-town instincts, a trust and recklessness she is unaware of; this is what people mean when they say. . . she has been away. . . She has the outsider's quick movements, preoccupied look, high-pitched, urgent voice, the outsider's innocent way of supposing herself unobserved.''

Nothing seems to happen in these stories, except in the ordinary way of plain people. Relatives from the city come to a small town for a visit with a cousin. Two brothers, seeking the old homestead where they were born, find that it has been uprooted to make way for a wildlife preserve. In a nursing home, two elderly widows who are lifelong friends become estranged, then reconciled. Still, only the surface of these characters may be viewed as plain. In her seemingly effortless prose style, Munro has etched portraits of people living underground dramas of high intensity.

Her characterizations are swift and telling. In Bardon Bus, for example, a young woman falls in love often and, like the heroine of Chekhov's The Darling, identifies herself completely with each successive man in her life. "She takes up a man and his story wholeheartedly. . . Next time you see her she'll be in deep, going to fortunetellers, slipping his name into every other sentence; with this mention of the name there will be a mushy sound to her voice. . . Then comes the onset of gloom, the doubts . . . She will get drunk, and sign up for rolfing, swim therapy, gymnastics. In none of this is she so exceptional. She does what women do."

Writing about ordinary life is hazardous; it may induce the boredom that is its subject. Munro defies the danger, and triumphs. --By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.