Women on the Edge

By R.Z. Sheppard

If black belts were awarded for writing short stories, Canada's Alice Munro would have one with bells on. Open Secrets (Knopf; 294 pages; $23) is another stunning victory over one of the toughest of literary forms. The eight stories in this volume are about women uneasily balanced between their conventional past and a present that tips them in new and strange directions.

No toe-stubbing subtexts are hidden here. Munro's gender agenda is neatly buried in her quietly daring art. An Albanian Virgin, for example, spans half a century and half the globe to join vastly different lives. A Canadian tourist who changes her itinerary in the mountains of southeastern Europe is captured by tribal Ghegs and put to work. Village routines induce a hypnotic adjustment that virtually erases her former self. The ways of these isolated Christians are bloody and strict. A woman can dodge her tribal fate as breeder and toiler only by renouncing sex, living alone and dressing in men's clothing. In this way the captive Canadian avoids being sold into a Muslim marriage.

The passivity of the character is barely credible, which is what Munro intends. The Gheg encounter, said to have occurred in the 1920s, is told to the narrator of a larger, more encompassing story by a woman whose reliability the reader is encouraged to suspect. Fact, fiction or a little of both, the exotic adventure mirrors changes in the life of the narrator, a Victoria, British Columbia, bookshop owner.

Munro's sure touch with uncertainty guides her other stories as well. A small-town Ontario librarian feels betrayed when the World War I soldier she corresponds with comes home to marry another woman. Yet personal embarrassment is only a starting point in Carried Away. The story extends over many years and contains enough twists, including an accidental beheading, to lead the woman to see her life eventually as "a devouring muddle" full of "sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations."

It takes some living to get to this insight. Other than Munro's considerable talent, the only constants in these stories are remorseless time and blind fate. This does not mean that Munro can't have a little fun. The Jack Randa Hotel is high comedy in which a woman secretly follows her runaway husband to New Zealand, where she intercepts his letters to a woman he does not know is dead. The abandoned wife then has her small revenge by forging snotty but elegantly written responses.

All the stories have roots in rural Ontario, where Munro, the daughter of a mink rancher, grew up. The area seems as familiar as the American Midwest, a flat, unexciting setting where even the bizarre can be made to seem ordinary. A missing girl returns to tell about an encounter with a spaceship. The extraterrestrials are not green and stalky but all-Canadian kids wearing seersucker sunsuits. This, of course, is an unbelievable fiction within a totally credible fiction. Munro demonstrates her mastery of this linkage throughout Open Secrets, where each story is richer and more satisfying than most novels.