Product Description

A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory–a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life.

The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.

Men and women are subtly revealed. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail of circumstance and feeling. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro’s large and ever- growing audience has come to expect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237278 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-06
• Released on: 2001-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
Readers know what they are going to get when they pick up an unfamiliar Alice Munro collection, and yet almost every page carries a bounty of unexpected action, feeling, language, and detail. Her stories are always unique, blazing an invigorating originality out of her seemingly commonplace subjects. Each collection develops her oeuvre in increments, subtly expanding her range.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is, of course, no exception. It is a fairly conservative collection of nine stories, none of which move far beyond Munro's favored settings: the tiny towns and burgeoning cities of southern Ontario and British Columbia. There are glimpses of youth here--in the title story, an epistolary prank by two teenage girls leads to a one-sided cross country elopement and, seemingly, a happy marriage, and in "Nettles," disrupted childhood affection fleetingly returns through a chance meeting--but most of these pieces are stories of aging women and men, confronting the twin travails of death and late love. As is always the case with Munro, their plots are too elegantly elaborate to summarize, and their unsentimental power is a given; baroque praise would be futile. Read these stories--it is the only way to really understand the miracles that Munro so regularly performs. --Jack Illingworth

From Publishers Weekly
A writer of Munro's ilk hardly needs a hook like the intriguing title of her 10th collection to pull readers into her orbit. Serving as a teasing introduction to these nine brilliantly executed tales, the range of mentioned relationships merely suggests a few of the nuances of human behavior that Munro evokes with the skill of a psychological magician. Johanna Parry, the protagonist of the title story, stands alone among her fictional sisters in achieving her goal by force of will. A rough, uneducated country girl, blatantly plain ("her teeth were crowded into the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument"), she seems doomed to heartbreak because of a teenager's trick, but the bracingly ironic denouement turns the reader's dire expectations into glee. The women in the other stories generally cannot control their fate. Having finally been reunited with the soul mate of her youth, the narrator of "Nettles" discovers that apparently benevolent fate can be cruel. In a similar moment of perception that signals the end of hope, Lorna in "Post and Beam" realizes that she is condemned to a life of submission to her overbearing, supercilious husband; ironically, her frowsy country cousin envies Lorna's luck in escaping their common origin. In nearly every story, there's a contrast between the behavior and expectations of country people and those who have made it to Toronto or Vancouver. Regardless of situation, however, the basics of survival are endured in stoic sorrow. Only the institutionalized wife of a philanderer in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" manages to outwit her husband, and she has to lose her sanity to do it. All of the stories share Munro's characteristic style, looping gracefully from the present to the past, interpolating vignettes that seem extraneous and bringing the strands together in a deceptively gentle windup whose impact takes the breath away. Munro has few peers in her understanding of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay. (Nov.)Forecast: Munro's collections are true modern classics, as the 75,000 first printing of her latest attests. Expect vigorous sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Another collection from the incomparable Munro, this one with a 75,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Munro in Full Bloom
Though some may call this a collection of short stories, when I finished reading each selection, I felt as though I had read a novel in beautiful miniature. Munro's characters are fully drawn; they grow and breathe as you read, and her plots are like quilts-pieced together in compositions that please as a whole and in parts. Love and its fickle, evanescent ways provide Munro's themes. A young woman watches her older sister handle her demanding husband along with other men; an aging man reflects on his love life while worrying about his wife's flirtations in a nursing home. In another writer's hands, these vignettes would fall short of the requirements for literature, but in Munro's experienced hands, these become seeds for enduring, indeed at times breathtaking, art.

Really enjoyed it
Alice Munro's short stories don't always impress me -- some seem too sedate, others too offbeat. However, this collection was very enjoyable. The lead story, which shares its title with the book, is wonderfully ironic and very well written, with characters that are drawn quickly and even sketchily, and yet they have such depth that if I were a critic, I would consider this Munro's masterpiece. All the stories in this collection refer to acts of love, but they are realistic. A woman has an affair that lasts a few hours but in her memories is maintained for a lifetime. Old childhood friends meet again as adults with the outcome far more and far less than the woman expected (the man, as usual, expected nothing). Women learn about themselves not just through romantic relationships but through the loving or non-loving family relationships they find. These are good stories, moving at the calm pace of reminiscences. Very well done. I was sorry when I finished the last story. I wanted more.

Crystalline view of human nature
Why would I impulsively urge teenagers to resist [other books]and read Alice Munro? Because, I suspect, they'd be lucky to be set anything that good in post-modern high school.

Munro plunged early into her first marriage and child bearing. There was more to her than the "reproductive daze, swamped by maternal juices", to borrow her sarcasm. She was not drowning, but saving ammunition. She published her first book at 37 and is still there at 70.

Language, sex, love, marriage, fate and death - Munro knows all their rhymes. The title for her 11th book comes from an imagined girls' game, along the lines of he loves me-he loves me not.

The leading situations of the stories appear simple, repetitive even.

Johanna, a stolid home-help, is lured onto the cross-Canada train by faked courtship letters. A widow has to settle affairs after her husband's planned suicide. Suffering cancer, a wife savours a single kiss with a cocky youth. One aspiring writer discovers new slants on sin and death, and another rediscovers a now-married childhood sweetheart.

While one young mother realises the smallness of her married life, another discerns the subtle point of a one-day affair. An older woman puzzles over the fate of Queenie, her lost stepsister.

Routinely, Munro stories take 30-40 pages to get from A to B and back through A again. She is a competitive writer in the best sense, almost preferring death to a failure to engage. She is determined to create some reverberations that the dutiful reader cannot help but absorb.

In Munro, I will accommodate habits that are annoying in lesser writers. I don't mind hearing one more time how she found her vocation. No matter if a single story wants to wander wilfully over three generations. Not a problem if the final paragraph charts the future life course of a principal character.

The disposition of restraint that greatly enhances the stories is the author's crystalline, yet charitable, view of human nature. The time-honoured technique that brings her view to life is an unerring ability to recreate regional speech and manners.

Laid out before Munro's eye, a crudely aspiring Southern Ontario dinner table presents fine gradations of behaviour that would do an oriental court proud. "There had to be far too much food, and most of the conversation had to do with the food," recalls her first aspiring writer. "There was a feeling that conversation that passed beyond certain understood limits might be a disruption, a showing-off. My mother's understanding of the limits was not reliable, and she sometimes could not wait out the pauses or honor the aversion to follow-up."

Reduced to an "information machine", Johanna's station agent decides that she lacks country manners, indeed has no manners at all. Not for his eyes are the nuances at Milady's, where Johanna blurts out her marriage plans while choosing a travelling dress. This is how Munro closes off the scene: "She must have felt she owed this person something - that they'd been through the disaster of the green suit and the discovery of the brown dress together and that was a bond. Which was nonsense. The woman was in the business of selling clothes, and she'd succeeded in doing just that."

Stripping the characters of their clothes if not pretences, Munro has always been an incisive reporter of sexual love. Not for her the slightly pornographic thrum of a Vladimir Nabokov, or the sexual tristesse of a Raymond Carver. She is closer to a Frederick Barthelme in directly accessing the torpid shame, dangerous electricity or dizzy elation of sex.

Munro's second aspiring writer no longer believes that "the high enthusiasm of sex fused people's best selves". Still, she aches to seduce the chaste companion of her childhood. The next day, somewhat returned to her senses, she is given this beautiful line: "Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back into a tidy pilot flame, attentive, wifely."

Through their sexual encounters, or other peak revelations, the characters may glimpse an intersection between what fate deals us, and what we can do about it. They might hear the precise few words on which a present life turns, or feel an intimation of an alternate life unturned. This one could have been a husband. That one is a weak love, which will fade. The other one, a strong love, is not usable in the circumstances.

And, as ever, there are the tart aphorisms. "After their short, happy marriage," Munro deadpans, "they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners."

It would take a special kind of honey to clear this mordant line from the back of the throat.

The title piece (Johanna's story) and one or two others compete for best of the litter. Comparing this collection with Open Secrets (1994), or The Progress of Love (1986), Munro seems to be holding her form.

This writer is the antithesis of the tortured artist. Faithful to what she knows, averaging one book every three years, she seems to have achieved much of what was originally within her reach.

(From the Canberra Times,23 March 2002)