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The Moons of Jupiter 1982

Contents
The Moons of Jupiter 1982 ............................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................................2

The Opening Pair .......................................................................................................................................................5

"CHADDELEYS AND FLEMINGS " ..................................................................................................................................5

Five Stories: From "Dulse" to "Prue" ........................................................................................................................6

"DULSE " ..................................................................................................................................................................6

"THE TURKEY SEASON" .............................................................................................................................................7

"A CCIDENT" .............................................................................................................................................................8

"BARDON BUS" ......................................................................................................................................................11

"PRUE" .................................................................................................................................................................13

The New Tide: The Last Five Stories ......................................................................................................................14

"LABOR DAY DINNER" ............................................................................................................................................14

"MRS. CROSS AND MRS. KIDD" ..............................................................................................................................17

"HARD-LUCK STORIES " ...........................................................................................................................................18

"VISITORS " ............................................................................................................................................................20

"THE MOONS OF JUPITER " ......................................................................................................................................22

INTRODUCTION

THIS VOLUME OF Alice Munro's stories shows both familiar and new features. It deals with strange oppositions
and mysterious contradictions that ask for resolution or at least recognition. Also, like Something I've Been Meaning
to Tell You--the previous collection of apparently unlinked stories--it has an integrity which, though less obvious
than that in Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are?, is as important as it is subtle. If Something
I've Been Meaning to Tell You is a cluster of small constellations, The Moons of Jupiter--as its title suggests--has a
tighter organisation and is more like a single system.

One of the first things one notices is that the stories are set in Ontario again, especially in small country towns.
"Dulse" has its episodes mainly in the Maritimes, and "Bardon Bus" some as far afield as Australia, but only
because characters in them, who live in Ontario, have travelled to these places. The second half of "Connection" is
set in Vancouver, but here the narrator feels the powerful force exerted by Huron County over the great distance that
separates it from the west coast. Martin Knelman reports that Alice Munro "believes now" [ 1979] that what
"propelled" her to write about "her own material" was "the distance between Vancouver and Huron County. " 1The
Moons of Jupiter is clearly rooted in southwestern Ontario: the Hanratty of Who Do You Think You Are? reappears,
and Logan and especially Dalgleish are not altogether different from the Jubilee of Lives of Girls and Women. But
there are heights and depths, even in rural Ontario; from it the imagination can reach to Jupiter and its moons.

Another general comment that might be made about The Moons of Jupiter is in point of style. The figures and ideas
presented are less striking or sensational, the surface of words less coruscating than in Lives of Girls and Women, for
instance. Thinking of Jane Austen again, one might remember what she half-seriously said of the "playfulness and
epigrammatism of the style" of Pride and Prejudice: it was "too light, and bright, and sparkling." Her later novels
were different, though never solemn, and greater.

But there is no sharp and distinct line in Alice Munro. In the first story in The Moons of Jupiter we find some of the
earlier almost outrageous exuberance and mischief: "Poverty, to Richard's family, was like bad breath or running
sores, an affliction for which the afflicted must bear one part of the blame. But it was not good manners to notice"
(12); this has the bite and wit that reached its apogee in Lives of Girls and Women but is still a marked characteristic
in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You and Who Do You Think You Are?

Instead of being conspicuously vivacious, paradoxical, droll and divertive, Alice Munro's style has become sparer,
more exact and incisive. The change is partly a natural consequence of adopting third-person narration. One of the
advantages of first-person narration is the opportunity for the fireworks of personal feeling, prejudice and animus. It
is appropriate for reflecting the excitement of an imaginative girl like Del, who is making discoveries, judging
rashly, and then reversing her opinions. The third-person is appropriate in Who Do You Think You Are? Because it
gives us more direct, less subjective bearings on Rose's dilemmas on her journey to a balanced maturity and vision.
This is not a simple matter, however. The third-person narrative in Who Do You Think You Are? still reflects some
of Rose's feelings, sometimes quite directly, as in, for example, "She saw them [the Vancouvers] in her mind shaped
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rather like octopuses, twitching in the pan. The tumble of reason; the spark and spit of craziness" (Who, 12), and
some of the best stories in The Moons of Jupiter are narrated in the first person. There is

the interesting case of "Dulse, " which was in the first person when it appeared in The New Yorker (21 July 1980),
and is now narrated in the third person, perhaps because Alice Munro felt that as narrator Lydia was having to know
and reveal too much about herself without the benefits of hindsight and a greater maturity.

Sometimes in this new volume Alice Munro attains the best of both, or several, worlds, in the manner of Lives of
Girls and Women. In the first two stories and in "The Turkey Season, " for example, there is the vigour, freshness or
confusion of a young first-person narrator, but also the irony of a mature moral perspective that we saw emerging as
early as "Boys and Girls" in Dance of the Happy Shades, but there is more emphasis on the fact that the narrator is
telling the story and commenting on the events long after they occurred. This method accommodates very naturally
that particular inward-turning or spiral development that Alice Munro's vision--as we have seen--so often generates.
In "Connection, " for example, as in Who Do You Think You Are?, the narration moves quite clearly towards a
reaffirmation, though with a difference, of the attitudes and values virtually disowned when the protagonist left rural
Ontario. One result of this is that there is less fizz, but more salt, in the narration.

If there is often less liveliness in the new style and the method of third-person narration, there is also abundant
recompense, enough fully to justify the selection of The Moons of Jupiter by the editor of the New York Times Book
Review (4 December 1983) as one of the thirteen best books of the year. Although from the beginning Alice Munro
has shown a strong architectonic sense, itis in her masterly control of detail, in the way in which she shapes and
orders so much intellectual substance into a whole that is charged with meanings and is coherent without seeming
contrived, that the new power is mainly felt. Gerald Noonan remarks on something like this apropos of Who Do You
Think You Are?: " Munro's sense of life as paradox is not softened by the shift in technique; paradox is presented
more directly. "3 Even when the material is as diverse and at first bewildering as it is in "Hard-Luck Stories" and
“Bardon Bus,” the details are skillfully placed and the instinct sure. In the revision of "The Stone in the Field, "
instead of the father "shaking hands" with his sisters, even if "quickly, " as he does in the version in Saturday Night
(April 1979), there is now "no touch" at all (25). Every stroke of the brush contributes to the complex unity of the
whole.

The new force and resonance comes in part at least from a fuller command of allegory and symbol. We have seen
allegory in, for example, the description of the Japanese garden in "Memorial" and the train's passage to its
destination in "Wild Swans. " But these are in a sense translations, and at the end of Who Do You Think You Are?,
when Rose comes up against the difficulty of defining or expressing what she feels for Ralph Gillespie, she
concludes that even translations are "dubious" and "dangerous" (Who, 206). The answer is implied in The Moons of
Jupiter: these feelings, which go beyond sexual attraction, can be conveyed in poetic symbols. Only they have the
capacity to convey this and other complex meanings, and they do this by virtue of their concentration and power.
These symbols now sometimes emerge as titles, which indicates their new importance. Whereas before the titles
tended to announce themes, such as "Mischief" and "Providence, " or point to central incidents, such as "Royal
Beatings" and "Spelling, " now one finds titles like "The Stone in the Field, " "Dulse, " and "The Moons of Jupiter, "
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which contain meanings that defy complete definition: they name objects that are symbols. Alice Munro probably
aspired to symbolism from the beginning. She has said: "Things are symbolic but . . . their symbolism is infinitely
complex and never completely discovered. "4 When we come to stories such as "Prue, " "Labor Day Dinner" and
"Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd, " we shall see that Alice Munro evolves a mode that dispenses altogether with a
reflector such as Del or Rose, and uses detached omniscience in the narration. It therefore relies almost wholly on
the value of image, symbol and dramatic incident.

It may be significant that The Moons of Jupiter is the only volume since Dance of the Happy Shades that does not
end with a reflection on the limitations of art. The closest that The Moons of Jupiter comes to this theme is a passage
in "The Stone in the Field": the narrator can "no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable,
or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize" (35). The next story is "Dulse, " where the secret is
communicated, but in a symbol.

There are various kinds of development in the volume. It is as if in this volume Alice Munro were bringing together
the forms of the constellation and the pendant. But the progression is somewhat irregular rather than steady and
arithmetical. Firstly, the protagonists are older in each story; at first they are young--one is a girl--then mature, then
middle-aged. In the last stories several are elderly. The approach of age becomes a theme, and the problem is how to
deal with it. Secondly, after the two opening stories, there is a concentration on personal attachments, and in general
the progression is from an involvement with passionate sexual love in the earlier stories, to discoveries of something
beyond physical obsession in the later stories. The relation between Valerie and her friends in "Labor Day Dinner, "
between Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd, between Wilfred and Mildred in "Visitors, " and between father and daughter in
"The Moons of Jupiter, " are all different and not easy to define, but they are all beyond what we commonly mean
by "sexual. " Compared with the grossness in "The Turkey Season" and the scarcely disguised animality in
"Accident, "the later sentiments, though strong, are rarefied and elevated, though one hesitates to use the word
spiritual.

In this volume it seems that Alice Munro is revolving in her mind a theme she mentioned to Carole Gerson after the
publication of Who Do You Think You Are? and not long before the appearance of The Moons of Jupiter: "Whether
you settle for a kind of freedom and happiness that doesn't necessarily contain erotic love, whether there is such a
thing, or whether in choosing freedom you have to deliberately put that kind of happiness behind you, or whether
everything's possible--I think it is, sometimes. " The sexual bond is not devalued; it is seen as compelling, but the
volume's enquiry reaches out to forms of attachment that are less substantial and rarer and in a sense therefore more
mysterious and perhaps precious.

A study of the stories in their order in the volume will disclose how it is organised. The first two stand a little apart
from the rest, as is indicated under "Contents. " If they do not have all the brilliance of the stories that open the
earlier volumes, they deal with a theme that is central in Alice Munro and, being solid achievements in themselves,
they form an archway through which passes the road that winds but leads ultimately to the climactic story that gives
its title to the volume. There we meet the most enlightened and least obsessive of all the strange varieties of love, but
also death, and Jupiter, the greatest of the gods.
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The Opening Pair

"CHADDELEYS AND FLEMINGS"

The first two stories, "Connection" and "The Stone in the Field, " are put together for a reason that is obvious: in
both there is a scrutiny of her antecedents by a girl or young woman who finds herself now in an

ethos altogether different. The first presents the narrator's mother's family and the second her father's. The question
that teases her is: how is it possible that she draws her being from sources so diverse and apparently so unlike
herself? It is a variation of the question that bore in on Del in Lives of Girls and Women and involved Uncle Benny,
aunts and an uncle, and a dead cow. This narrator's mother's relations are "in favor of movement, noise, change,
flashiness, hilarity, and courage"-- in a word, "fun" (16)--whereas the father's six elder sisters, all unmarried, live
together in the house where they were born, rigidly confined within their simple but stern ethos; they resist all
change and in fact "belonged in another generation" (22).

Thus the two stories stand at the opening of the volume like an entrance that the narrator must pass through before
she can know or come to terms with herself and begin her life. Passing through entails acknowledging, accepting,
and somehow resolving the oppositions and contradictions that meet in herself, or at least framing a view that will
accommodate the strange incongruities. She is facing the sort of questions that Del met, but she is less lively and
imaginative than the heroine of Lives of Girls and Women.

When she was a child her mother's cousins were exciting and amusing as visitors in the small Ontario town, but now
the narrator is married to a Vancouver lawyer who--the case of Patrick and Rose is repeated-- taunts her with what
he regards as an uncivilised "background" (12); but then again she feels guilty about her vulnerability on this score.
She is another of Alice Munro's many intelligent, sensitive and morally perceptive protagonists who find themselves
under pressure in the middle, between two opposites. But the signs are that she will escape from the snobberies and
artificial gentilities that have her captive. She is already able to recognise and salute the courage and vitality that
Cousin Iris represents, and in the last story in The Moons of Jupiter we find that she has left Richard (228), but only
after having had two daughters by him.

The companion piece, "The Stone in the Field, " presents a problem that is similar and yet different. Although the
feeling here is less of shame and guilt than of incredulity: "I couldn't really think of her [one of her father's sisters]
as my aunt; the connection seemed impossible" (22), her aunts do cause her to feel "bewilderment and unexplainable
guilt" when she receives a card from one of them and realises that they "were still there, still attached to me" (31).
They seem to belong to a primordial era. (There are stronger suggestions of this in the The Moons of Jupiter version
than in the earlier version in Saturday Night [ April 1979]. ) They live in a world felt to be antique: the gulf between
them and the narrator is emphasised by the fact that her mother works with a dealer in antiques; "possibly the word
antique was not known to [her aunts]" (28). In the end they have disappeared as completely as the stone in the field;
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not only does their place know them no more, but it has been taken by people with an ethos altogether antithetical to
theirs. A sentence that appears in "Visitors" is relevant here: "Brothers and sisters were a mystery" (212).

The name of the narrator of these two stories does not appear, but in the last story, "The Moons of Jupiter, " we
recognize that we have the same narrator again with the same father, and her name is Janet. These three stories were
removed--as we have seen--from Who Do You Think You Are? just before it was published. "Connection" and "The
Stone in the Field" are accomplished pieces, and, in the youth of their protagonists and in the questions they raise,
these twin stories constitute a fine opening for The Moons of Jupiter, but thematically and technically they remind
one of Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? "The Moons of Jupiter" is another matter.

Five Stories: From "Dulse" to "Prue"

"DULSE"

The third story, "Dulse, " is still in a sense introductory, setting out before us a set of possibilities. The protagonist is
forty-five, and works for a publisher. Divorced nine years before, now on the rebound from an affair with Duncan, a
very detached and private person, she has withdrawn to "an island off the southern coast of New Brunswick" (36) as
if to get as far away from human involvement as possible.

But she is soon playing Skat with three workmen of the New Brunswick Telephone Company, who are of course in
a literal sense attaching the off-shore island to the mainland. Here we see Alice Munro's new architectonic sense
working with allegory and other artistic structures: these three--the boss, Lawrence, Eugene and Vincent--provide a
spectrum of choices. "She thought about what those men would have been like, as lovers. " Lawrence, nearest her in
age, is "cheerful, hearty, prudent" (51), but his "teasing amounted to bullying" (45); his approach is "vulgar, " but he
"would have been her reasonable choice" (51); Eugene, twenty-five, has "a masculine beauty that was nevertheless
soft-edged, sweet-tempered, bashful, " allows the other two to tease him (45), and "would be a grateful, self-
forgetful lover" (51). Both Lawrence and Eugene are available: "she could have gone to Eugene, and earlier in the
evening she could have given a sign to Lawrence" (50). But, strangely enough, it is Vincent, fifty-two, who interests
her most: "she could not imagine him as she easily imagined the others"; she "was shy of thinking any such things
about him, " with his "courtesy and reticence and humor, his inability to better his luck" (51). Itis Vincent--whose
name means "winning" or "vanquishing"--who unobtrusively leaves her the bag of dulse, which was "so good for
you" (47); this is a sign, but of a kind of love different from the love Lydia might have enjoyed with Lawrence, less
physical, more refined. It is a mode that Lydia has yet to learn. She has already tried those associated with Eugene
and Lawrence, but now Vincent opens up for her the possibility of a new kind of relationship.

It is significant too that Vincent seems to Lydia "the sort of man she had known when she was a child living on a
farm not so different from his, the sort of man who must have been in her family for hundreds of years" (52). He is
another kind of connection, spiritual rather than physical, though the refined affection involved--offered "from a
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distance" (59)--is more fully manifest in the dying father at the very end of The Moons of Jupiter. In this way
"Dulse" sets up a wide arch that spans the volume, and the end will in a sense be another return to the beginning, but
with a difference.

One should notice the emphasis on Lydia's transition: "she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become
another. " It is as if her sex-appeal is failing: "people were no longer so interested in getting to know her" (36). She
needs to discover a mode of love appropriate to middle-age, and perhaps old age. At the end of the story she is
"getting to like" dulse (58), which is sweet by name and sustaining both physically and metaphysically, literally and
symbolically.

The host and hostess in "Dulse" provide a comment on attachment and detachment, but more prominent and
interesting is the elderly Mr. Stanley, who is a model of another choice Lydia might conceivably make: he has
enclosed himself in a detached privacy by becoming a devotee of the writer Willa Cather, who has been dead for
many years. Lest we or Lydia should feel condescending towards him and the "lovely, durable shelter he had made
for himself" (59), he administers a polite but telling rebuke to Lydia. When Lydia almost scornfully suggests that
Willa Cather could have had nothing helpful to say about married love, presumably because she was a lesbian, Mr.
Stanley replies: "She knew things as an artist knows them. Not necessarily by experience" (57). 7 This is a truth that
Lydia, though she is a poet, has overlooked. Nevertheless Mr. Stanley's solution is not open to her because she is the
sort of person who needs human attachment, company and warmth; she will always be drawn to a game of Skat with
a Lawrence, a Eugene, and perhaps a Vincent. "Dulse" is proleptic, indicating something of the scope of the volume
as a whole.

"THE TURKEY SEASON"

This story follows "Dulse" and with its atmosphere of brutality and coarseness--words like "gutter" and "gutting"
strike at the very beginning a note that is sustained--it stands on the lowest rung of the ladder of relationships in The
Moons of Jupiter. The narrator is--at the time of the events in the story--a fourteen-year-old girl, intelligent and
refined enough to be in the Turkey Barn but not of it, and thus an effective commentator. She is another of the
narrators in the middle, and again this narrator is looking back from her maturity. The centre of attention is Herb
Abbott, the foreman, of unstated age, but apparently a good deal younger than Lydia in "Dulse. "

At the heart of the story is a mystery, never fully resolved: how is it that a man as capable and, in a real sense, as
distinguished as Herb, who is attractive to and sought after by three very different kinds of women-again as in
"Dulse, " Alice Munro achieves the effect of a spectrum by portraying Lily and Marjorie, the coarse and brutal
voluptuaries, the genteel Gladys, and the young, "educated" (62), idealistic narrator, for whom Herb has something
to do with "a sense of promise and . . . of perfect, impenetrable mystery in the universe" (68)--how is it that such a
man should be drawn so compulsively to Brian, a mere boy of eighteen or nineteen, worthless, foul-mouthed and a
ne'er-do-well, who "seemed just like somebody with a bad case of hiccups--his insistent sexuality was that
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monotonous and meaningless" (69). It is not a question "of whether Herb was homosexual or not, because the
definition is of no use to me. . . . He is not a puzzle so arbitrarily solved"(65). It is too slick an explanation; even if
true, it still leaves the question of why Herb is drawn to someone of Brian's quality.

The narrator ponders "contradictions" (68) in the lives of Lily and Marjorie, and especially the question: "How could
these women's hands be so gifted, so delicate and clever . . . and their thinking so slapdash, clumsy, infuriating?"
(68). The mystery about Herb is a far more urgent one for the narrator, and for them all, and more baffling because
his qualities are greater: he had "the efficiency and honor of the [turkey] business continually on his mind" (62), and
his vulnerability is therefore all the more conspicuous.

What intensifies the mystery is that Herb, in his "dignity" (74) and aloofness, is something of a loner; he is
"circumspect"(64) and keeps all his admirers at a distance. His surname, Abbott, has an effective resonance. And
yet, "Isn't it true that people like Herb--dignified, secretive, honorable people--will often choose somebody like
Brian, will waste their helpless love on some vicious, silly person who is not even evil, or a monster, but just some
importunate nuisance?" (74); Brian, "mixing insult and provocation" and "turning all his assets into parody" (69),
seems even lower in the scale than Lily and Marjorie, whereas Herb has some of the "courtesy and reticence" (51) of
Vincent in "Dulse. " We are facing a mystery somewhat reminiscent of those that surround, for example--to take
only one of Alice Munro's earlier books-- Uncle Benny, Madeleine Howey, Mr. Chamberlain and Bobby Sherriff in
Lives of Girls and Women. At the end of the story, "Herb walked off by himself" (76), leaving us with the enigma:
the strangeness of something as familiar as physical attraction, one of the most disconcerting faces that love can
present.

"The Turkey Season" is one of the most successful stories in the volume. Its vivid images horrify, and the low
dialogue is utterly convincing; it has a taut dramatic structure producing a climax that brings together the various
threads. The ending is a triumph of sardonic irony: the turkey-gutters sing their coarse parody of "We Three Kings"
and convert the dream of a white Christmas into a gory shambles to make a Christian holiday.

"ACCIDENT"

Next comes "Accident, " which was moved up one place between the proof-stage and the publication of "The Moons
of Jupiter" so that it comes before instead of after “Bardon Bus.” Alice Munro made this change perhaps because,
although like "The Turkey Season" it gives prominence to physical compulsion, "Accident" presents it in a form that
is more familiar, and therefore perhaps only seemingly less mysterious and less coarse. The attraction here is one
rung higher on the ladder, but the story is less successful.

"Accident" is the longest story in "The Moons of Jupiter", but not the best. One can see reasons for its place in the
design of the volume. Herb in the previous story was perhaps thirty; here Frances, if she is the same age as her
friends, is in her "early thirties" (82), and Ted, her lover, is "under forty" (83). The atmosphere in "Accident" does
not reek as grossly of gore and sexuality as does that of "The Turkey Season, " but it is disturbing enough, having a
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similar source in naked, unrefined sexual desire, a "painful kind of lust" (85). The story fits into the scheme of "The
Moons of Jupiter".

"Accident" was first published in November 1977 (in Toronto Life); the second story published, "The Moons of
Jupiter, "appeared in May 1978(in The New Yorker) and the third, "The Stone in the Field, " (in Saturday Night) not
until April 1979, almost a year later. The first two stories mark out extreme opposite limits in human relationships
and so constitute a sort of frame for the volume. "Accident" may in some sense have provided the seed for the
pendant that "The Moons of Jupiter" is. If this is so, one can see that it would occupy a significant place in Alice
Munro's mind and I must therefore take up more space than usual to justify my relatively unfavourable estimate of
the story. But first we must see how it takes its place in the volume.

It is a tragedy; the statement near the end of the story that, many years later, "inside she's . . . the same Frances who
was there before any of it" (109), brings no comfort because here Frances's intelligent and ironic vision is trying to
save her from bitterness. The truth is that, just as she used "[to shy] away sometimes . . . from hearing what people
[had] to say "about Ted (80), so now too there are things that are "too ugly to think about" (109), or conclusions too
ugly to come to. When she says, "We will have to be careful" (107), she means "careful to avoid admitting the truth.
" The poignancy of this conclusion perhaps redeems the story.

Frances's story is grim. She is not the narrator of the story, but she is a typical Munrovian protagonist, a sensitive
music teacher; her favourite composer is Mozart, who seems to connote the elegance, wit, and refinement of feeling
that Frances finds so conspicuously lacking in Hanratty. Ted, a teacher of science, has "no interest in music" (105).
Alice Munro sets up the same sort of unfulfilling relationship that there is in "Dulse" between Lydia and Duncan.

Frances is confined within the suffocating, small-town air of Hanratty and has to live with her mother, who is
appallingly torpid, insensitive and self-centred: her only interest is in physical gratification, through food, not sex.
Frances is also thrown together a good deal with her sister-in-law, in whom obsession with the physical takes the
form of an "insider's knowledge" of an undertaker's procedures (92). Hanratty's preoccupation with the grossly
physical expresses itself in humour too: Adelaide "had enjoyed a year or two of sexual popularity, or notoriety, puns
being frequently made on her name" (95).

Frances really belongs to a sphere above the physical. To take one apparently insignificant detail, it is noticeable that
"of course, Frances had forgotten" to buy the pork chops that her mother is looking forward to (91). We feel
Frances's dissatisfaction--her "disgust" (96)--from the beginning in her impatience, irritations and restlessness. Her
condition is almost aggravated by the fact that she once did escape, to the conservatory of music, for four years (80).
We feel a great pity for her; the title of the story refers primarily to the accident that kills Ted's son, but more
shrewdly to the accident that involves her sexually with one who is really so alien to her. She takes up with Ted
because she must escape somehow from the dullness and limitations of Hanratty. The story is a tissue of unlucky
accidents. Frances forgot the pork chops, but her mother at the crucial moment forgot to tell Frances "that the
minister had phoned and wanted Frances to call him back"(105); he might perhaps have given her strength to refuse
to marry Ted. When the titles of the stories in "The Moons of Jupiter" do not declare a symbol, they incline to an
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irony that is absent in the titles of earlier stories: irony is pungent in "The Turkey Season, " "Hard-Luck Stories, "
and "Accident, " somewhat muted in "Labor Day Dinner, " and pathetic in "Prue. "

Although "Accident" is carefully structured, coherent, and in parts moving, its effects, compared with those in most
other stories in The Moons of Jupiter, seem laboured; words such as "orgy" and "aphrodisiac" have been removed
from the story since its first appearance, but the meanings are still so clearly emphasised that it brings to mind some
of the early "formula "stories--"The Idyllic Summer, " for instance. Frances's sensations during the lovemaking in
Ted's supply room--"a sort of pantry" (82), which reinforces the connection between food and sex in Hanratty--are
graphically conveyed, and what is constantly underlined is the physical and even anatomical detail--"the long
stomach ulcer scar, the appendectomy scar" (86); there are "a human skeleton and a cat's, some bottled organs, or
maybe organisms" (82) in Ted's supply room. This physical basis has been skillfully led up to from the beginning of
the story, when Frances's irritability manifested itself physically. But, though we never lose sympathy with Frances,
we weary a little of the demonstrations that in taking up with Ted she is making a bad mistake. Not only does she
avoid the truth, but Ted is so clearly an unsatisfactory character from the beginning: even Frances knows that "his
classroom behavior is different from what he has led her or anyone to believe" (79). A strange sort of split in him, a
fundamental dishonesty, is constantly emphasised. He comes as close to the plain, unmysterious, unamusing, and
really not very interesting villain of melodrama as does any character in Alice Munro. There is a curious animus
against him: even the facts that he is "not in the war"--it is 1943--and looks "Tartarish" (83) seem to count against
him. The presentation of Ted lacks the larger sympathy or understanding that embraces and takes delight even in
villains and that Alice Munro showed in the portrait of, for example, Madeleine Howey and Mr. Chamberlain in
Lives of Girls and Women.

The affair between Frances and Ted is unsatisfactory not only because Frances is doing some sort of violence to
herself: both have to "make [a] switch" or manage a curious "crossover" (83) before they can make love
satisfactorily, and their lovemaking is almost literally unhallowed. The regular and in fact routine assignation for
their very deliberate lovemaking is at the church, indeed in the Sunday-school classroom, and moreover on a
Wednesday night, presumably the most unsanctified time because the furthest removed from the Sunday morning
church service. The weight of all these ironies is not qualified by any countervailing force. What one misses is a
dynamic interplay between two modes or principles, almost equally valid, and working perhaps through some
creative friction towards a resolution or epiphany. Frances is too passive a victim, the situation too static, and the
irony that oppressively informs the comments on Hanratty is too persistently sardonic, as when Ted's young
daughters skate to the "blurry music" of a Strauss waltz, and enjoy "in a subdued and guilty way, the attention their
brother's death was bringing to them" (106).

Even the imagery seems sometimes too obviously allegorical and pat: the insistence on the narrowness of both the
supply room (82) and the classroom (100), the two places where they make love, plainly makes them correspond to
the town, Hanratty, itself, which is "such a narrow place, crude without the compensations of the wilderness,
cramped without any urban variety or life"(96). Similarly the way in which Frances is "trying to get her [Plymouth's]
spinning wheels out of a drift" (89) makes its point less subtly than the reader of Alice Munro expects. In method of
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approach "Accident" is perhaps a transitional story. Alice Munro seems here to be working very deliberately with
images, motifs, allegory and symbol to achieve an elaborate structure and a fully documented atmosphere but not to
have arrived at the tact and delicate control that declare themselves apparently so effortlessly in "The Moons of
Jupiter", " published only six months later.

It is interesting to notice that in "Accident, " by making Ted and Frances profane the United Church premises, Alice
Munro is leaning on or referring to something like a traditional Christian framework of ideas. The very next story,
“Bardon Bus,” invokes the concept of the "soul" (111, 127), which goes back to St. Paul and beyond him to Plato,
and "The Moons of Jupiter" uses machinery that goes back beyond Plato to the origins of ancient Greece. Alice
Munro comes to master all the resources and traditions of Western art and civilisation, but meanwhile, in "Accident,
" the effect of the Christian apparatus is to make the moral somewhat ponderous and the story rather obvious and
uninteresting.

"BARDON BUS"

"Bardon Bus" is interesting as a successor to "Accident. " It is a contrast in that its meaning is far from plain. Again,
the protagonist is older: she is older than Dennis, who "must be thirty-five" (118) when she narrates the story. The
story is about a crisis: she must accommodate herself to the loss of her lover, X, and, like Frances, to what she feels
is the dullness of the quotidian. (Thus the two stories make a pair like, for example, "Marrakesh" and "The Spanish
Lady" in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You. ) As we have seen, this theme is at the very centre of Alice
Munro's fiction, involving the familiar, the ordinary and the banal on the one hand, and on the other the strange, the
exciting and the romantic. If life is to be fulfilling, the touchable and the profane must at some point meet the
mysterious and the divine.

The narrator in "Bardon Bus" has at least once attained this transcendence, but only in Australia, which, with its
"jacaranda, poinciana, frangipani" and "kookaburras" (119), is the exotic setting for her short

but supremely happy liaison with X: "everything seemed familiar and yet not to be confused with anything we had
known in the past"; even shopping "for groceries at Woolworths" (112) was an intense experience. All sorts of
antinomies, such as freedom and security, were reconciled: "We felt we knew the lives of the housewives. . . . This
familiarity was not oppressive but delightful"; "we had a holiday of lightness of spirit without the holiday feeling of
being at loose ends. " And all this time they went about their usual tasks: "Every day X went off to the university
and I went downtown to the research library"(112-13) to work on the book of "family history which some rich
people [were] paying" her to write (111). The story provides a glimpse of a happier, higher and fuller love
relationship than any we have seen thus far in the volume, though Vincent's dulse gave a hint of something like it.
But this happiness was all in "Australia Felix" (113); the narrator's problem-- and it is the one that Frances failed to
solve in "Accident"--is that she feels very differently when, "lying on a mattress on the floor of Kay's apartment at
the corner of Queen and Bathurst streets [in mundane Toronto], " she is aware of "the streets full of people going to
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work, the street cars stopping and starting and creaking on the turn" (114); in the Australian city the prosaic-
sounding "Bardon Bus, No. 144" (112) had connoted for her nothing but various excitements and intense felicity.
This is an example of a much more successful, because less obtrusive but evocative, working of motif and symbol
than we find in "Accident. "

The situation in the story is thus far as it is in "Accident. " But “Bardon Bus,” though appreciably shorter, has a
much fuller development and is among Alice Munro's best stories, presenting oppositions and interaction, and
having a dynamic structure. This is easily seen by considering the character of Kay, who is in contrast to the
narrator. Where the narrator fails, Kay succeeds, even in Toronto. It is true she lives on a farm outside, but she
"keeps this place in Toronto" (115) and transforms it by, for example, making "the mattresses on the floor look more
like divans and less like mattresses. " In the same way she combines making her living as a "botanical illustrator,
doing meticulous drawings of plants for textbooks and government handbooks" (114)--a disciplined and fairly
humdrum occupation--with falling in love "wholeheartedly" (116) and frequently, having "daring, sometimes
grotesque" affairs with many diverse men; "she never tires of a life of risk and improvisation" (115). One of her
lovers, an artist, left "sketches, and a lavish horrible book on anatomy which showed real

sliced cadavers" and more (116); unlike poor Frances in Accident, Kay is able, if only temporarily, imaginatively to
transform immediate, crass physical reality, and because she alternates "straightforward [and] analytical" with
"mystical" phases (117), she is constantly "renewing" (122) herself, though usually only with difficulties and
"struggle" (116).

This last concept--renewal--is introduced by Dennis, an odd and interesting character. Here again this story
compares favorably with "Accident, " where the meanings are so plain and so directly presented. Dennis might at
first seem to have solved a problem like the narrator's: he is constantly travelling, is full of travellers' news and
stories, and his life sounds exciting. But the reader begins to realise that his mode is even less satisfactory than the
narrator's: he "always talked about the last place he'd been and the last people he'd seen, and never seemed to notice
anything" in the here and now (119). Dennis is the variant of the narrator, her dreams and fancies, like his stories,
being a means of evading the exigent present.

But she is also different from Dennis, and from Frances, and here again we see how much more dynamic or
dramatic than "Accident" this story is. Whereas Frances is trapped from the beginning, and whereas Dennis's train of
thought leads to "renunciation" and life-denying "deprivation" (122), the narrator of "Bardon Bus" has within her a
vital driving force that is seeking a creative solution. We watch her attempt, incipient, and not getting very far
perhaps, but suggesting the possibility of her rising above her "despair" (123). She is often in a bad way, one of
those women, like the figures dug up in China, that "have to be put together and stood on their feet" by X (120); her
desperation at her failure to achieve the romantic issue, her "desire, and longing, and hopelessness, " bring her
pornographic images which only deepen her despair (123); Alice Munro has described her state as "hysterical
eroticism. " But her very consciousness of the depth of her despair is perhaps a hopeful sign. At all events, after a
vain attempt to renew herself by dressing in dramatic or provocative clothes, relying on external aids rather than
inner resources, she arrives at a specially "low point" (126). She has another dream, which seems to offer
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consolation with the prospect of an embrace of "souls, " but then--the dramatic dialectic is again remarkable—she
realises that the dream is only "banality and innocence" (127) and "misplaced" (128).

It is at this point that she goes to Rooneem's, "an Estonian bakery where you can usually find a Mediterranean
housewife in a black dress, a child looking at the cakes, and a man talking to himself"--a series of very ordinary
sights. Although part of her is still on the lookout for X, another part realises that she has reached "the limit" of "the
amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love" (127) and is now getting hold of "an uncalled-for
pleasure in seeing how the design wouldn't fit . . . a pleasure in taking into account, all over again, everything that is
contradictory and persistent and unaccommodating about life" (127-28). In other words, she is coming to terms with,
which means finding some sort of pleasure in, reality. She knows now she needs "a deliberate sort of rest, with new
definitions of luck. Not the sort of luck Dennis was talking about. You're lucky to be sitting in Rooneem's drinking
coffee, with people coming and going" (128). (It is the sort of perspective realised by George and Roberta at the end
of "Labor Day Dinner. ") She will now have the insight and resilience to cope with the unpleasant surprise at the
very end of the story which before would have seemed likely to extinguish her. There is a strong contrast between
the merely ironic dramatic stasis in "Accident" and the dynamic inward- turning development in this story.

"PRUE"

After "Accident" and “Bardon Bus,” two stories about two different passions, we come to an ironic story in which
there are liaisons and talk of marriage, but passion is notably absent. "The Moons of Jupiter", as a volume, has its
own dialectic.

"Prue" is slight and cryptic. Alice Munro has described it as "a neater story than I usually write"; its neatness goes
with the wry irony that informs it. Now the protagonist is well into middle-age--in her "late forties" (130). For some
years she has had a partly-on-but-mainly-off affair with Gordon, who is a shilly-shallyer, a "helpless, baffled soul,
squirming around inside his doughty fortress" (132); it is ironical that he is a "neurologist" (130). He seems to have
allowed his interest in food and comforts--his house has four bathrooms (131)--to supplant his sex drive. A "quite
young" and vigorous woman, whom Gordon thinks he loves, denied ingress to Gordon's house on a night when Prue
is his guest to dinner, hurls her overnight bag at him, apparently out of frustration.

Gordon claims that he wants to marry Prue after he has got over "being in love" (132) with the younger woman;
perhaps he is attracted to Prue because she is habitually "cynical" and "lighthearted, " "doesn't

take herself too seriously, " is "unintense, and civilized" (129), "bright, " and a "cheerful spectator" (130) who can
speak "lightly" (132) of important matters; above all, "she seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly
indulgence" (130).

Throughout the story the short clipped sentences generate a dry ironic humour, and the joke is largely at the expense
of Prue, who is more aptly named than she admits (130). When Gordon leaves her alone early in the morning, she
picks up a single amber cufflink from his dresser and carries it off before the arrival of Gordon's housekeeper, her
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"friend from olden times. " She possesses herself of the cufflink not for sentimental reasons, not as "booty, " nor for
its "ritualistic significance"; and she drops it into an old tobacco tin, where it joins several other ambiguous trophies,
and "more or less forgets about it"(133). She does not have the passion to throw an overnight bag at Gordon, so her
response takes a devious form, apparently obscure even to herself because she shows no sign of recognising it for
the revenge it is. She so slenderly knows herself that her attitudes, and even her "English accent" (129), are
artificially cultivated poses: she tells their friends that Gordon's attitude is "quite reasonable" (133), but her
suppressed passions tell a quite different story.

In accordance with the method of constructing oppositions and contrasts that she employs so often and to such good
effect, Alice Munro has in this story written a counterpoise to "''Accident, " and this may be why the stories were
side by side in the proofs. In "Prue" a love relationship that denies or makes light of sexual intimacy is as
incomplete as that between Frances and Ted, which had no element in it other than the sexual. Each story bears a
truth that is complemented by the truth in the other, though the moral in "Prue" is more effective because it is
glancingly and even wittily reflected. The two stories together make a sort of start line from which a story like
"Labor Day Dinner" can go forward. "Prue" itself can be seen as a sort of slackwater: the flow of sexual passion has
been denied and a new tide has yet to set in.

The New Tide: The Last Five Stories

"LABOR DAY DINNER"

This is a great story, and it is crucial in the plan of the volume. The main situation in the story involves a mystery.
We have seen how prominent throughout Alice Munro's work is the juxtaposition of two apparent incompatibles: the
legendary past and the mundane present of Becky Tyde or of Jenkin's Bend, the life-styles and ambience of the
households of siblings or near relations (as in "At the Other Place" and "The Stone in the Field"), the scarcely
comprehensible gulf between Uncle Benny and the Jordan family, who have him to eat at their table, or the
immediate and powerful attraction between young people as different as Del and Garnet French, or Herb and Brian.
In "Labor Day Dinner" the particular form that the mystery takes is the alienation or marital tiff between George and
Roberta that can be so bitter and last for days, though they are both people of intelligence, sensitivity and goodwill
and have a genuine though temporarily overlaid affection for each other. Roberta is roughly the age of Prue, though
in fact a few years younger--forty-three (150)--and George is apparently younger still.

George is the more aggressive of the two, yet "he wants to go and find Roberta and envelop her, assure her--assure
himself--that no real damage has been done. He hoped to be able to do that last night when they went drinking, but
he couldn't; something still held him back"; "How out of [such happiness as they had known] could come such
touchiness . . . such a threat of collapse he cannot imagine" (150). It is a portrayal of silent, relentless marital
warfare, which had been touched on in "Mischief" and "Connection, " but not as fully and convincingly developed
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as it is here, where we hear of "the great tactical advantage of being the one to whom the wrong has been done . . .
the unforgivable thing said" (137).

It seems that the "physical attraction" (153) that Eva (in a jest that carries truth) suggests brought George and
Roberta together, and that made their love bloom like an "amaryllis" (140), has weakened, or at least it needs the
support of other feelings. Roberta realises that "sexual abdication is not enough" (156); she cannot settle for the sort
of life Prue accepts. She was once happy, playing "giggling" games (148) on the beach with her first husband, from
whom she is separated, but she is now "on the verge of being a nervous wreck" (147).

There are of course important differences between George and Roberta. He comes of central European working-
class background, addresses himself to real and practical tasks such as scything the lawn and roofing the house. But
he is primarily a sculptor. His habits and taste, firmly rooted in the work ethos, contrast with those of Roberta and
her two daughters; they are of the sophisticated, pleasure-loving middle-class with interests and instincts close to the
theatre and ballet. Roberta has a markedly eclectic taste in books; George complains of her "persistent wish to be
admired and courted" (136), whereas he "likes working without spectators" (144). He is confident and assertive, and
she tends to hesitation and self-depreciation. These differences might, however, be the basis of a good relationship
between complementary individuals rather than causes of chronic matrimonial warfare between incompatibles.

The story describes the visit of George, Roberta and Roberta's daughters, Angela and Eva, to Valerie's country home
for Labor Day dinner, and one hopes of course that somehow the occasion and the visit will produce a slackening of
tension. George and Roberta arrive as if "they had been engaged in tender and lively conversation" on the way over
(137). Valerie's home has a distinct but unpretentious style; here, "under the shade of two aloof and splendid elm
trees that have been expensively preserved, " in a beautiful old Grey County house (134), there is a "household of
many delicate checks and balances" (139). It is a sort of Eden, but precarious because achieved, or preserved, by
human effort. Its ambience is established in the opening paragraph, and later we come to see it as a pattern for
human achievement and survival, as it is indeed for marriage also: all require careful and "expensive preservation. "
Alice Munro's art now conveys large meanings subtly and felicitously through paradigm and symbol.

There are several signs of the differences between the two families. Valerie sets much less store by her appearance
than Roberta does: "You could never say that Valerie is looking to be courted or admired"; her "long, plain face
seems to be crackling with welcome, eager understanding, with humor and intelligence and appreciation" (138). She
was once a "school counsellor" (139), just as her daughter Ruth--who, with a similar disregard for appearances but a
confident sense of family solidarity, wears her brother's shirt and "striped pajama bottoms" (150)--has "given up
wanting to be an actress, " and is now "learning to teach disturbed children" (138).

The help that George and Roberta need is not easily come by. It cannot be ready-made or prepackaged and offered
as Counsel or Guidance, even when it is of the kind that Kimberly, for whom "all the arguments have already been
won" (156), seems ready to dispense from the New Testament. This "very clean and trim" girl, about whom "there is
a slight feeling of an official person" (139), is the girlfriend of David, Valerie's son, but antipathetic to Valerie, who
is however "not an un- Christian" (144). Valerie, who has worked hard at her beautiful house and garden and as hard
at human relations--she "will throw herself headlong into any conversation to turn it off its contentious course"
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(156)--even supports Kimberly against George in an argument about round and pointed arches, not merely to avoid
unpleasantness--in fact all argument in her house proceeds in a civilised and enlivening way- but because she
believes that "we are more than products of our upbringing" (157) and therefore argues that the adoption of the
pointed arch in Europe was not simply the result of Arab influence but the expression of a deep religious sentiment.
Valerie, who has gone beyond erotic love, which is "something [she] could do without being reminded of" (140),
has a perennial faith in what might be called the mysterious valiance of the human spirit and refuses to be paralysed
or dismayed by "all this talk about overpopulation, ecological disaster, nuclear disaster, this and that disaster,
destroying the ozone layer--it's been going on and on, on and on for years, "because "here they sit, all healthy,
relatively sane, with a lovely dinner . . . in the . . . undestroyed countryside" (157). And we feel she knows the effort
that must be made and the price paid to save the countryside, and the human race, not to mention George and
Roberta's marriage, from destruction. But George has been working at his house and farm for two years with the
energy and devotion that Valerie has given to her house and garden for fifteen (141), and this suggests the hope that
in the end George's comparatively stern work-ethic and Roberta's cultivated hedonism will, with the enlightened
goodwill that they both show as well as with hard work, be able to live together in something like the harmony that
Roberta's daughters' names express the hope of.

Valerie's spirited gratitude goes with, if it does not spring from, a sense of perspective and proportion. Something of
the same feeling had stirred in Roberta the night before, at the drinking party, when, confronted by the story about
the woman with a "front-end loader, " she saw "against what odds . . . love takes root and flourishes" (154). It stirs in
George when he makes his "offering" about "a gibbous moon" (158). So when they narrowly escape a common
death in a car accident on the way home, we assume without being told that they are ready, under the influence of
Valerie, who knows how to live and even rejoice in the face of various kinds of "disaster" (157), and prompted by
their own reviving impulses, to renew their relationship on a plane above and beyond the love that derives mainly
from sexual attraction. In fact when Roberta "wavers on the edge of caring and not caring" (158), we might be
reminded of lines that occur twice in T. S. Eliot "Ash-Wednesday, " and of the spiritual state they refer to. Labor Day
has in the end achieved what it is designed for: an acceptance and celebration of labour and life. We realise that men
must labour not only at their jobs, but at life itself: the verse in Genesis--"in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread" -- takes on new meaning.

Again in "Labor Day Dinner" one can see a pattern of the spiral dialectic. Up to this point the volume has taken us
through a landscape of contradictions and inconsistencies, but now, at the end of this story, there is a suggestion of a
movement beyond the violence and irrationality of alternating sexual love and psychic hate and in a new direction,
towards something like lovingkindness. The volume's dialectic is spiral. This movement gets under way without
benefit of religious doctrine; it springs from impulses native to intelligent and ordinarily kindly people and it is
helped by unconscious friendly example. George and Roberta will again see, as they once did, "the unlikely ways
the stars tie up into their constellations" (150); they have begun with the "gibbous moon, " and from here the
heavenly bodies are touched with a symbolic significance that is suggested in the last story, and in the title of the
volume.
 P a g e | 17

Something should be said about the way in which the story is told. By the simple device of using passages in the
present tense for the story-line and laminating these with sections in the past tense, Alice Munro slows down the
action so that central incidents are given full attention, but without making the action either confusing or tedious,
because by this method she economically establishes perspectives that allow the reader to see the origins and the
significance of the otherwise ordinary events. The story is technically very interesting, besides being one of the
subtlest and most moving in the canon.

"MRS. CROSS AND MRS. KIDD"

This story takes us forward in one leap from middle-aged characters to octogenarians; the two old women in Hilltop
Home are the oldest protagonists in the volume and their story is the first of three stories in the volume about
characters who are elderly; the others are "Visitors" and "The Moons of Jupiter. " Like all the stories after
"Chaddeleys and Flemings, " this is the story of an attachment between two people. But the attachment is as far
removed from the sexual as it is possible to be. Nevertheless, as Alice Munro told Peter Gzowski in the interview on
the CBC radio programme "Morningside" (21 October 1982), the story is "about love. "

What is at first stressed are the differences and barriers that existed between the two when they were girls and young
women living in the same small town. The differences seemed total-social, religious, intellectual, in the way they
spoke, in the games they played, and in almost every conceivable aspect of life, even progenitiveness. Eighty years
have ironed out most differences, but not all: "they themselves are the only ones who can recall what separated
them, and to a certain extent does yet" (161) when they come together as "old crocks" (178) in Hilltop Home, where
a remarkably full life goes forward--games, jokes, visiting, alliances, and even falling in love.

They are alike in having a drive for influence and power; this is socially unexceptionable in both, yet it manifests
itself differently in each. It partly separates them after their late coming together. When she encounters Jack, who
has had a severe stroke at fifty-nine, Mrs. Cross "felt something stretching in her. It was her old managing, watching
power"; this leads to her "takeover of Jack" (168), and the discontinuance of the two old ladies' card games. Soon
Mrs. Cross is in a state something like love--maternal love: "Before she went to sleep, Mrs. Cross would go over
everything that had happened with Jack that day" (173). Meanwhile Mrs. Kidd, left in something of a lurch, has
"taken on" Charlotte (173), who, it is true, "was itching to be somebody's slave" (175). The two old ladies have "not
had any falling-out or any real coolness" (174) however; they only spend less time together.

Alice Munro now gives a characteristically ironic turn to her plot: Jack and Charlotte become attached, leaving the
two old ladies rather high and dry. But, again characteristically, she does not leave the story on a note of
Maupassant-like sardonic irony. The old ladies heal the slight breach between them, and their second coming
together reinforces the quite unsardonic irony that there can be real affection even in old age, when the basis for it is
mutual need and loneliness. The comedy is poignant, but there is not a grain of sentimentality in the pathos.
 P a g e | 18

The story is indeed remarkable for the spareness of the authorial comment: "Some people had nobody" (166) is
typical of the terseness. And the moving attachments that we see are not expatiated upon but conveyed in an
unobtrusive dramatic shorthand: Mrs. Cross comes "walk-

ing slowly behind Jack's chair, to help him steer" (179), even though Charlotte had taken over Jack's chair (177-78).
Then, in a fine climax to the sequence, Mrs. Kidd, at some risk to herself, presses her wheelchair on Mrs. Cross,
who was her social and is still her intellectual inferior, gives it a "calculated, delicately balanced push" to get Mrs.
Cross to her door, and suffers a temporary collapse as a consequence (180).

Mrs. Cross is a companionable and generous soul whose goodwill is simple and patent, but Mrs. Kidd is more
remarkable. Cultivated, tactful, self-critical--she checks herself for tending to boss Charlotte--with a pride and
dignity that make her unwilling to be an object of pity and yet do not inhibit an uncondescending affection, she is a
character of convincing distinction. With her dignity, insight and reticence, she might have been inclined to
patronise or dismiss Mrs. Cross as ignorant, prying, and indeed "common, " but in the final incident she
unobtrusively risks her life for her, demonstrating a full sense of sisterly affection.

In "The Turkey Season" the attraction of Herb to Brian was mysterious, because they seemed to have so little in
common, and also potentially tragic. Here the differences between Mrs. Kidd and Mrs. Cross are hardly less
significant; the latter has of course none of the dangerous and slightly sinister aura that surrounds Brian, but the
attachment is formed in spite of the differences. Because the upshot here is a happy one the force at work seems
perhaps less mysterious, but hardly less wonderful. The story is simple and moving, not one of Alice Munro's
profoundest, but a consummate piece of workmanship, typical in that it is a study in differences and similarities in
which oppositions are broken down and transcended.

What is new is the spare style of the narrative, something like what we saw in "Prue, " but without the underlying
sardonic irony. Alice Munro's earlier successes were in the use of a first- or third-person reflector and a retrospective
technique, as in Lives of Girls and Women, Who Do You Think You Are?, and more recently, for example, in
"Dulse" and “Bardon Bus.” Now, in "Labor Day Dinner, " and more clearly in this story, she has mastered a
detached, omniscient dramatic narrative of the kind that failed in "A Trip to the Coast" (Dance) and "Accident. "
"Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd" is especially fitting as a companion for "Labor Day Dinner, " which it follows, because
both reveal that the stream of human affection with its sovereign sanative power runs underground even when it is
deeply buried by pettiness and prejudice. The story reminds one, in its scene and effect, of "Spelling" (Who) and also
of some of the early chapters of Lives of Girls and Women. The perspective of old age can, like the fresh exploring
imagination of an intelligent child, conduce not only to the forming of friendship but also to realising the solidarity
of the human family.

"HARD-LUCK STORIES"
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This is a tough nut. In the first place the three main characters are a good deal younger than Mrs. Cross and Mrs.
Kidd, though their ages, and the name of the narrator, are unspecified. But the story is intriguing. The first step in
cracking the nut is perhaps to notice that the narrator tells her story "turned mostly towards Julie" and away from
Douglas, who in fact is the unnamed man that she "was in love with" (192) and who treats her so scurvily in her
hard-luck story. (The hard-luck stories are arguably stories of good luck, of narrow or happy escapes.) Since the
time of her story, Douglas has ditched the narrator in order to take on Julie. This behaviour is of a piece with a good
deal of what is shown in the story, which is almost a catalogue of unhappy attachments: Julie feels that she has
"missed out on every kind" of love, especially the sort involving sexual passion, in her marriage (182); the narrator
herself is divorced, and in her story is being made use of by Douglas to "counter" (195) Caroline, whom he is in love
with even though he describes her as "a sexual monster" (194); at the same time Caroline "arranged to have [her] old
lover [Douglas] and her new lover together, just to stir things up" (195), and her new lover, Martin, treats and speaks
about her unfeelingly.

The narrator tells Julie that there are "two kinds of love" (182)-- presumably passionate sexual love and a different
relation in which the lovers might say, in Donne's words,

But we by a love, so much refin'd. . . . Inter-assured of the mind, Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse. ("A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning")

Disillusioned by Douglas's treatment of her--his "descent into love is swift and private and amazing" (185), and
"before, during, and after making love, he kept on the subject of Martin" (194)--she seems, subconsciously at least,
to want release from sexual connection. It is she who introduces Julie to Douglas, apparently hoping that he will like
her, and perhaps wanting to "stir things up, " as Caroline does. She is attracted to a verse on a tombstone that speaks
of "afflictions" borne a long time and of "ease" after "Pain" (196), and, while Julie looks at the "Roll of Honour" in
the church, she is drawn to "a row of footstools, where people could kneel to pray" (196). At this crucial moment
Douglas brushes "his hand down my back . . . [and applies] a slight pressure to the ribs" (196-97) while on his way
to make an advance on Julie; the narrator is suddenly "stumped by a truth about myself, or at least a fact, that I
couldn't do anything about" (197). It is an epiphany. She sees that Douglas, like Caroline, needs both kinds of love,
or two different attachments at the same time: someone to like, and someone whom he will not necessarily like but
can enjoy passionate sex with. On the footstools she sees the dove "with the olive branch, " and also a "trillium. "
All three characters at this moment feel "an unacknowledged spring of hopeful ness" (197), but there are at least two
different kinds of hopefulness involved. Douglas and Julie are no doubt a little intoxicated at the prospect of sexual
pleasure, and the narrator, who has "published a poem or two" (193), is elated by her vision, prompted by these
"ancient" and "homely" emblems (197), of a possible state of spiritual grace. Here we see again the marriage of the
old and the new, the familiar and the strange, but now this is achieved dramatically in specific symbols.

Because the characters are comparatively young, one might have expected the story to be placed early in The Moons
of Jupiter, but a reason for its being placed as late as it is is apparent: the concept of a mode of love other than the
sexual is clearer than in any previous story, and this prepares us for other manifestations of love in the last two
stories.
 P a g e | 20

With her vision of grace and happiness the narrator becomes "boisterous" (197), but the fantasy that the three of
them entertain of running away together to Nova Scotia, establishing a ménage à trois-- in order to become
something like the triadic set in Yeats "The Lady's Second Song, " allowing "Love [to] cram love's two divisions /
Yet keep his substance whole"--is clearly a ridiculous notion, a symptom in the narrator of dissatisfaction and
frustration. For her this is a fantastic, unrealisable spiral development.

There is an extra irony, however: while for most characters in the story the sexual connection seems to produce an
unhappiness that is sometimes savage, for Julie, the children's librarian, family hiker and health-enthusiast who is
"virtuous at heart" (though she has had two "almost-affairs" [191] that "turned out very funny" [187), sexual passion
with Douglas brings revitalisation.

Alice Munro is now so completely liberated from strict observance of linear sequence that she here starts the
narrative with an episode that occurs chronologically at the end of the sequence; in this opening Julie catches the
narrator's attention "in a way she had never done before. It was the hat. I thought there was something gallant and
absurd about it, on that tall, tomboyish woman" (181). But one supposes that Douglas, who is "a sort of pirate" (184)
in affairs of the heart as well as of business--his surname is "Reider"--will eventually bring disillusion and
unhappiness to her too.

Perhaps the obliqueness, ingenuity and complication of the strategy partly impede the effect in this story. These
qualities certainly stand out in the context: it follows a simple story, "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd, " and is followed
by another that is simpler still--"Visitors. "

"VISITORS"

"Visitors" is a straightforward story, except in its surprising ending. We have switched, as happened so often in
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, from one social plane to another, from the emancipated, intellectually
aware Douglas and Julie in the previous story, to the limited, but unpretentious, small-town life-style of Wilfred and
Mildred; and the latters' cheerful, uncomplicated relationship is very different from that between George and
Roberta in "Labor Day Dinner. " But in several other respects we are back on the track. Wilfred and Mildred are not
as old as Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd, but they "had married in late middle age" (202) and might be described as
elderly. Furthermore, they have given up sleeping together: with visitors in the house, they "had to share a double
bed. They weren't used to it" (200). But Wilfred is able to make good-humoured and somewhat gross jokes about
this (201), and later, though Mildred had stripped the bed the visitors had vacated, she "hadn't got it made up again,
so she lay down beside Wilfred, on their first night by themselves"(215). This notation conveys that their easy
relationship has gone beyond sexual intimacy, but has not rejected physical contact with the sort of bitterness that
appears in the previous story: when they find themselves together in the double bed they goodnaturedly "aligned
backsides" (201). After "The Turkey Season, " "Accident, " "Bardon Bus" and "Hard-Luck Stories, " we find here a
milder climate of love; it is not sultry and sizzling, and on the other hand it is
 P a g e | 21

not the chilly passionlessness that was in "Prue. " But if Wilfred and Mildred have gone beyond sex, they cannot be
said to have reached anything like a spiritual plane: Mildred explains that they are "not regular churchgoers" (202),
and in fact they seem never to go at all. They certainly do not engage in any esoteric or private spiritual exercises.

That "Visitors" must appear somewhere on the same chart that plots the stories that involve sexual passion is clear
from the brief history we are given of Mildred's apparently lengthy affair with a married man. Not only did he on his
deathbed virtually deny the value and even the fact of his relation with her, but he misled her about the cottage at
Amberley Beach: "She had thought all along it was in her name, but it wasn't" (203). Again a merely sexual relation-
-though "his need for her was so desperate, " "it was never love" (204)--brought neither reward nor any valuable
satisfaction. Mildred is an easy-going, unintellectual, "good-hearted" (204) woman--she thinks "cozily of her own
life long ago" (205)--and has survived the affair without rancour or apparent hurt. She can even joke about it: "You
know I'm secondhand goods?" (204). Wilfred too is generous, good-natured and friendly, as appears in his treatment
of the waitress (204-5) and in his story about Blanche Black (207-8), which is a parallel to the account of his
courtship of Mildred; he is not uninterested in "the subject of pretty girls and homely girls" (207), but he had
remained unmarried, had engaged in friendly associations with women, without torridly passionate involvements,
and had been more at home with the guys "in the bar . . . listening to the hockey game"(209). It is interesting that his
connection with lake boats (202, 209) seems not to connote sexual looseness as it did in "The Turkey Season" (69);
in "Visitors, " as in "The Moons of Jupiter" (220), lake boats suggest merely liberation and freedom.

"Visitors" serves to give cohesiveness to the volume. Another motif resumed here--though it is related to the central
pattern of attachments--is that which concerns cousins and siblings, prominent in the two opening stories. "Brothers
and sisters were a mystery to [Mildred]. There were Grace and Vera [sisters], speaking like two mouths out of the
same head, and Wilfred and Albert [brothers] without a thread of connection between them" (212). Grace and Vera
are not twins, but their identity in appearance and behaviour is a comic undercurrent, and there is comedy too in the
width of the differences between the two brothers.

Mysteries thicken at the end, however. Albert, who has seemed to be such a complete blank in conversation, either
silent or curt and humourlessly literal, shows himself quick and passionate with imaginative interest--his "face was a
bright pink and his eyes had a fierce, concentrating look" (212)--about the position and structure of the old, now
demolished, family dwelling, which he recalls exactly and in detail, while Wilfred, usually talkative and jocular, is
silent and even less attentive than Mildred, who politely shows "as much interest as she had energy for" (212).

Then Albert tells his story about the man who disappeared into the swamp. Here he discloses an imagination that,
though naive, has a depth and intensity far beyond the range of Wilfred and Mildred; Mildred looks for a ready
explanation--suicide, murder, "debt or . . . trouble about a girl. " Albert's notions that the man "could have wanted to
go wild" (213) and that he lived on "flesh" (214) suggest perhaps that he could comprehend, for example, the quite
other existence of Uncle Benny, who lived in the swamp in Lives of Girls and Women. Wilfred and Mildred are
confined in imagination to the actual circumstances of their lives in Logan. Mildred has perhaps never been much
further from Logan than McGaw and Bullett Township, "forty-five miles" away (209), and even there all the
common vegetation, apart from goldenrod and wild carrot, is strange to her, limited as she is to her small-town
 P a g e | 22

world. Wilfred, although "he had worked from California to the Yukon and from the east coast to the west" (203), is
as far removed from an awareness of Uncle Benny as he is from consciousness of heavenly bodies--whether a
gibbous moon or the moons of Jupiter.

Alice Munro scores the difference between the brothers in part by indicating how they tell stories. Mildred reflects
that if Wilfred had been telling Albert's story about the man's disappearance, it would have acquired "some kind of
ending, "because in his stories "you could always be sure that the gloomy parts would give way to something better,
and if somebody behaved in a peculiar way there was an explanation for it, " but Albert's story does not have these
conventional features; it is "not a story, " Albert says, but "something that happened" (215). What sort of stories
people tell, and how they tell them, are indexes to their characters, and also reflections on the relation between art
and reality, as we see here and, for example, in Flo's stories in Who Do You Think You Are?

"Visitors" is a story that springs a surprise on the reader. We think that we have got Albert sized up, then we find we
have not: he lives outside the comforts and confines of the ethos of Wilfred and Mildred and of conventional art. In
his own way he is in touch with reality. This discovery further widens the gulf the reader sees between the brothers;
but then again, in spite of this, when Albert's party has gone, the undemonstrative Wilfred has inexplicable "tears
welling up in his eyes" at the thought that he and his brother "will probably never see each other again"(216).
Wilfred sometimes has "wild dreams" (200) that disturb his sleep, and this seems to suggest that his incorrigibly
joshing manner has thickly overlaid an unconscious awareness or angst that he will not admit and that we did not
suspect. Again, when we think we have got the trick and hang of the thing, it suddenly transforms itself into
something stranger and more mysterious than we thought it was.

"THE MOONS OF JUPITER"

In the last story of the volume ageing culminates in death--the death of the father of the narrator, Janet, who was also
the narrator of "Chaddeleys and Flemings, " though in those two opening stories she was unnamed. "The Moons of
Jupiter" is, then, in this as well as in other senses, a formal conclusion to the volume.

If the dates of first publication are not misleading, "The Moons of Jupiter" was written before all the other stories
except "Accident, " before the new narrative method matured. It is certainly in Alice Munro's tried and true mode of
first-person narration, and none the worse for that. With "Labor Day Dinner" and "Dulse, " it is among the most
successful and moving stories in the volume, and worth the trouble of a close analysis.

The story provides a thematic as well as a formal close. In Janet's father's attitudes we find, on two fronts,
unflamboyant models of what the volume has been feeling its way towards: an intelligent posture in a fully loving
relationship beyond sexuality, and an attitude towards impending death. The first of these is defined mainly in the
father's attitude to Janet, but before examining that we should look at the troubled relationships in Janet's family.

Janet, separated now from her husband (Richard) in "Connection, " has her problems with her daughters: Judith, the
younger, is jealous of Nichola, who is Janet's favourite, or at least her chief concern. In spite of this, Nichola is
 P a g e | 23

"incommunicado" in Toronto when Janet visits from Vancouver. And though Judith and Don, "the boy she was
living with, " meet Janet at the airport and make their apartment available to her, they avoid Janet by driving off to
Mexico together the day after her arrival.

Moreover "Nichola and Judith were [only] sometimes on good terms" (221). It is clear that relations in Janet's family
are uneasy and fragile. Every stroke and detail in the story is made to count: Janet notices and feels hurt and
excluded by the way "Judith moved ahead and touched Don's arm" (223), and yet, long before, Janet "did not think
it could ever be detected" when she "was touching [Nichola] with a difference" (229); Judith has clearly detected
and resented her partiality to Nichola.

In the morning after her arrival Janet understandably "wanted to see somebody who wasn't related to me, and who
didn't expect anything in particular from me, " so she rings Tom Shepherd, an old lover of hers-- he has the same
name as Rose's rather casual lover (Who, 204), and is presumably the Tom in "Providence"--and is "answered by a
machine" (223). She consoles herself with a morning glass of vermouth, and only then phones her father at
Dalgleish, someone who might expect something in particular from her. Sure enough she finds that he is within
fifteen minutes of driving himself to the Toronto General Hospital after a heart attack; almost immediately she hires
a car, drives to Dalgleish, leaves with him at noon, and gets him to the emergency room at seven in the evening. She
has responded to her father's need more dramatically than Judith did to hers, but apparently with something of the
same merely dutiful attention. Janet herself comments on the similarity between herself and her daughters: "I did the
same thing at that age" (222).

Between daughter and father there is a cross-current rather like that between daughter and mother: she had been
"offended" that her growing up had been a blur to him even though she finds that her own children's early years had
been a similar blur to her (222). And now she does not feel any "protest" at the doctor's bad news about her father
and seems almost resigned to his dying. Also, I could hear him saying, Well, I didn't see anything about you in
Maclean's. [Janet is a writer. ] And if he had read something about me he would say, Well, I didn't think too much of
that writeup. His tone would be humorous and indulgent but would produce in me a familiar dreariness of spirit. The
message I got from him was simple: Fame must be striven for, then apologized for. Getting or not getting it, you will
be to blame. (219)

He is still in the country tradition of Jenkin's Bend, where "to be ambitious was to court failure and to risk making a
tool of yourself" (Lives, 38); and it was Miss Hattie of Hanratty who said to Rose, "You can't go thinking you are
better than other people just because you can learn poems" (Who, 196).

But Janet's attitude to her father changes in the story, which is in fact her account of her discovery of her father. She
sees his unfamiliar "bare torso" (220), and this is correlative to her dawning appreciation of him as a human being,
one who is capable of tragic experience, with a sense of his own "wasted life" (225), and yet he uses this term
without self- pity; this culminates in Janet's "appalling rush of love and recognition" (226). The familiar, what has
been taken for granted and overlooked, suddenly becomes wonderful and strange as well. By this point in the story
the reader has seen enough of the father and his singular qualities to appreciate Janet's epiphany.
 P a g e | 24

One of the most striking of the father's qualities is his resilience, his ability to accept, and then make the best of, the
circumstances of life, to do "gracefully" whatever has to be done, even when under pressure. "He never made a fuss.
" At the opening of the story he is in bed, the day after his admission, a country "workingman" (220) in a large city
hospital, facing his serious illness and worrying about the expense of his semi-private room. Very soon his spirit is
valiantly but unhistrionically rising above his oppressions and expressing itself in his genially irreverent humour: he
calls the large machine that he's "hooked up to" one of those "doohickeys" (217), is jocular about his tranquillisers--
"the happy pills" (218)--and about the "young fellow, the doctor, [who] might have been a bit too eager to operate.
'A bit knife-happy, ' he said. He was both mocking and showing off the hospital slang" (219). At first he is relieved
that there is to be no operation, and he thinks of good reasons for avoiding one: "Think of the risk at my age, and
what for? A few years at the outside. I think the best thing for me to do is go home and take it easy. . . . That's all
you can do, at my age. Your attitude changes, you know. You go through some mental changes. It seems more
natural" (220)--and by "it" he means death. It is clear that here he isrationalising a tame giving in or surrender. But
on the fourth day he has made the courageous choice: "'Well, it looks like I'm going to have it'. . . . He had done a
complete turnaround overnight. 'It looks like I might as well'" (224). We might remember Flo's remarkable
turnaround in "Spelling. "

His humour and imagination preserve him from the self-pity that Janet is sometimes on the edge of. This is shown in
his "making fun of himself" even as he speaks of his "wasted life" and also, more subtly, when he quotes some
verse: he knows that "lonely" and "empty" are not right to go with "seas, " and when he remembers "shoreless"
(225) he is delighted and knows it is right because of its connotations. The other two epithets make too straight a
pitch at pity, and moreover "shoreless" suggests the courage of the voyager as he sails out into the unknown. In the
poem, Joaquin Miller's, once known to every schoolboy, it is Columbus setting out into the unknown seas, and in the
story it is Janet's father facing the undiscovered country.

On the other front, that of a loving relationship, Janet's father has a word of advice that is of great significance in the
general scheme of The Moons of Jupiter: "Keep out of your children's business. I tried not to say anything. I never
said anything when you left Richard. . . . It wasn't any of my business. . . . But that doesn't mean I was pleased"
(228). The attitude that Janet has criticised and even resented as something like indifference, here, in the hours that
he knows may be his last, declares itself as a wise, considerate detachment that is informed by loving care. He
might, for instance, have had his other daughter, Peggy, informed of his condition--"I guess we ought to tell them"--
which would have been tantamount to a summons to his bedside, but he knows that Peggy is due to go on a trip to
Amsterdam, where her husband Sam is attending a conference, and he does not want to have them "wondering about
changing their plans, " so he does not let them know (227). With the same considerateness, which might remind us
of Simon in Who Do You Think You Are?, he did not ask Janet about Nichola, not because he was not interested and
concerned, but because he knows the subject is painful to her. And he can love and take pride in Peggy's husband as
well as in her--while Janet indulges in a petty peevish dislike of Judith's Don: "I decided that his beard and hairstyle
were affected" (222)--even though he makes "mild jokes" (227) at Sam's and Peggy's expense, such as we have seen
him make at Janet's. It is again a case of caring while seeming not to care. This comprehensive, watchful but
undemanding love expresses itself with restraint: when Janet takes leave of him at the hospital for almost the last
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time, "we laughed, we kissed formally; I left" (228). Here is the relationship that Janet should try to establish
between herself and her daughters, and she seems in the end to be nearer realising a notion of love that is "measured
and disciplined" (230). She cannot help watching the crowd on Bloor Street in the hope of seeing Nichola, but she
knows that Nichola "was one of the grownup people in the world now, one of the shoppers going home, " and "If I
did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided" (233).

Before he dies Janet's father achieves a quiet triumph in the hospital, making this initially strange and potentially
inimical territory in a sense his own homely familiar stateroom: he "was sitting in a chair by the window. He was
bare-legged, wearing a hospital dressing gown, but he did not look self-conscious or out of place. He looked
thoughtful but good-humored, an affable host" (232). From this throne his courageously insouciant imagination
makes the full range of human experience and knowledge a kingdom in which he feels as much at home as in his
own back garden. He discourses and speculates philosophically, yet with a quick suspicion of cant, pretentiousness
or high-falutin, like Socrates before the hemlock, on the deepest and highest topics: poetry, the existence of the soul,
the experience of death, and also, casually and dispassionately, "practical details" (226) such as "his will, the house,
the cemetery plot" (227).

Then, on what both he and Janet know might be, and in fact is, his last evening, because Janet has passed some time
at the planetarium, the conversation turns to matters astronomical (232-33), introducing the vast scale of the
universe and with it a sense of perspective and proportion even more striking than what appears towards the end of
"Labor Day Dinner. " With none of the advantages provided by the plush planetarium, which was occupied--
ironically--by inattentive and restless schoolchildren and by one other unattached adult besides Janet, "who looked
as if he might be here to keep himself from going to a bar" (230), the country workingman is able easily to
remember all the planets, stumbling momentarily over the order only, and then, challenged by Janet, he goes on to
name the moons of Jupiter, though not the "bunch of new ones"(232). He moves naturally from this engagingly
slangy idiom--he is at a far remove from the simulated "awe" that the promoters of the planetarium "supposed they
ought to feel" (231-32)-- to say "gravely" that "the moons of Jupiter were the first heavenly bodies discovered with
the telescope" (232), and then back again to his irreverent racy style to list the "girlfriends of Jupiter's" that the
moons were named after and to wonder whether Ganymede was a shepherd (233). His courage and imagination--the
way in which he makes the strange familiar and the mysterious in a sense touchable—might remind us of the father
explaining the Great Lakes in "Walker Brothers Cowboy" at the very beginning of the first story in Alice Munro's
first book; it is apt that the same process should be shown at the end of the last story of her fifth book.

Responding to the hospital's public address system, Janet takes her last leave apparently casually--"I'll see you when
you come out of the anesthetic"--but "when I was at the door, he called to me, 'Ganymede wasn't any shepherd. He
was Jove's cupbearer'" (233). These are his last recorded words, and of course the reader sees that they apply aptly to
himself. "Any" is a masterly stroke of Alice Munro's art: it conveys with an aptly unpretentious, indeed colloquial
force, that although we might mistake the father for a common and unremarkable man, a mere shepherd from Mount
Hebron (24)--he has just been described as "bare-legged, " in a hospital gown--because he responds and does honour
to the created universe he is much more like a cupbearer to Jupiter, its god. Moreover, like Ganymede, and Callisto,
 P a g e | 26

whom, Janet tells us, Juno "changed . . . into a bear and stuck . . . up in the sky" (233)--Janet has taken from her
father his courage, his tone, and even his idiom: "You've turned pretty cheeky now I'm going under the knife, " he
says (232)--he will be enskied in a sort of apotheosis, at least in Janet's mind.

It is in itself, for all its comparative brevity, a powerful and poignant story that deals with grand themes without any
rhetoric or melodrama. Its construction is strong, and on a typically Munrovian pattern: Janet finds herself in the
middle, both a daughter and a parent, between positions potentially opposed. But she rises above the opposition. By
becoming a loving daughter she gains the insight to become a more effectively loving and potentially beloved
mother.

Besides being a splendid free-standing story, it is also a fine conclusion to the volume. It leaves us with an image
that supplies not only the title of the story and the volume, but is also suggestive of the overall theme as well as of
the structure of the book. The theme is human interrelationship, and the structure is that of a system made up of
stories that are separate bodies, like moons, held together and in relation to one another by a central concept,
appropriately represented in the image by the chief deity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, (greater far than Venus!) who
also invests with due importance the story that is--when one looks at it from another angle--the culmination of the
pendant. The story may be in the old mode, but in establishing subtle parallels and potent symbols, it points forward
to the new mode of "Labor Day Dinner, " "The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry" and "The Progress of Love. "

Lives of Girls and Women was about girlhood, Who Do You Think You Are? about maturity and womanhood, and
now The Moons of Jupiter deals with middle-age, senescence, and death. There is thus a continuity and coherence in
the body of Alice Munro's work as well as in each story and each volume, and, since Lives of Girls and Women at
least, each whole is greater than the sum of its parts.