Alice Munro.

Alice Munro has published 14 short story collections, but only three recent ones have come with accounts of their creation. The title story of Too Much Happiness (2009), which focuses on a Russian novelist and mathematician, prompted an acknowledgments page about the research that went into it. With disarming enthusiasm, Ms. Munro explains that she came across the life of Sophia Kovalevsky, who died in the late 19 century, while looking for something else in the encyclopedia. She was so taken by Kovalevsky’s story that she transformed her into one of the many eager, frustrated young women whose lives Ms. Munro has been narrating for decades.

Two other recent books have been similarly close enough to their sources that Ms. Munro felt obliged to describe how she wrote them, but in these cases the sources were personal, and the process more difficult to explain. The View from Castle Rock (2006), like all of Ms. Munro’s books, has been called a short story collection, but as she writes in her foreword, it verges in several ways on nonfiction. The first part, which recounts the lives of her ancestors in 18th-century Scotland, came out of genealogical research but was written with fidelity as much to the records as to Ms. Munro’s idea of how to shape them into stories. The second part, which concerns the life of a young woman in the Ottawa Valley—Ms. Munro lived there once, and has used the area extensively in her fiction—is something else entirely. These later stories “were not memoirs, but they were closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person,” Ms. Munro tells us in her foreword. Their first intent is not to be stories, but rather to explore “a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality ...”

It’s hard to imagine any other writer describing how she incorporates facts into fiction by speaking only of her own process. But this is characteristic of Ms. Munro, whose work has built so steadily on itself over the past 40 years that she seems to belong to a school of her own. The second part of The View from Castle Rock would not be unfamiliar to someone who has read even a handful of her previous stories. There is the childhood house on the outskirts of town, the adolescent affair with a local man, the few years of college, the early death of her mother, and the early marriage to a fellow student she always seems destined to leave. She has returned to these situations again and again. The circumstances and implications vary from story to story, but there is still far more repetition than most writers would allow themselves. If there has been a significant shift in the way Ms. Munro works with her source material, the words for describing it could only come from her own intuition.

In her latest collection, Dear Life (Knopf, 336 pp., $26.95), Ms. Munro once again works with personal history and describes the process of doing so. In an editorial note that draws a sort of curtain over the last part of the book, Ms. Munro writes, “The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and closest—things I have to say about my own life.” If we are to believe this, it suggests that Ms. Munro has now gone as far as she can with her central material. Certainly, she could not have done more to imply that these four works represent the end of her career, short of making an announcement. She has titled this final section “Finale.”

The story that closes the collection, “Dear Life,” has a feeling of culmination. It opens with a broad survey of the landscape of her childhood home, as though this were our last look at this place, as in fact it may be. The story also has a certain level of self-awareness and even self-importance: it alludes to all the other stories Ms. Munro has written about this place, hinting that this one alone has come from beyond the realm of invention. Describing the land that has been the background to so many of her stories, Ms. Munro writes, “even farther away, on another hillside, was another house, quite small at that distance, facing ours, that we would never visit or know and that was to me like a dwarf’s house in a story. But we knew the name of the man who lived there, or had lived there at one time, for he might have died by now. Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only a life.”

This reflexive turn has been part of Ms. Munro’s work almost from the beginning of her career, but it was not until this most recent book that it came to seem the heart of her project. As early as her third collection, it appeared in the story “The Ottawa Valley,” when the narrator continued remembering a week spent with her mother but seemed to have lost the thread of the narrative. At this point in her story, Ms. Munro turned on her own work, in what felt less like a playful gesture than an authentic realization. She wrote, “If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could.” Ms. Munro has described “The Ottawa Valley” as “a big turning-point story,” one that allowed her to write “all about dissatisfaction with art,” but since then she has rarely done so this directly.

When she has turned on her own work in this way, it has almost always been in relation to characters based on her mother. It’s hard to imagine that many muses have been as frustrating or as productive as the Ontario schoolteacher Anne Laidlaw, who began to suffer from Parkinson’s when her daughter was still very young. As Ms. Munro writes in “The Ottawa Valley,” “She is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it does not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did.” Readers have been lucky, you could say, that for decades Ms. Munro has struggled to represent her mother, and that this struggle has animated her writing. Sixteen years after “The Ottawa Valley,” she started another of her most extraordinary stories, “Friend of My Youth,” with the words, “I used to dream about my mother.”

With “Dear Life,” it seems possible that Ms. Munro has found a way to solve the long-standing problem of being unable to render a satisfying portrayal of her mother. The story she eventually tells, which she claims is not a story at all, is about another mother and daughter who lived in their house before them, whose relationship strangely and almost miraculously mirrored Ms. Munro’s loss of her mother and obsession with recovering her. “Dear Life” nearly becomes a ghost story. It also claims, as Ms. Munro often has in recent years, to remarkable effect, that capturing life and creating fiction are somehow at odds with each other.

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Though Ms. Munro has burrowed into town records, inspected graveyards, and read family letters and diaries, articles in a previous century’s Blackwood’s and family members’ manuscripts, and though she assures us that, where her own life and character are concerned, nothing is made up, this is not a unified factual history like Francine du Plessix Gray’s magnificent epic of archival investigation, reportage and recall, Them: A Memoir of Parents, or Doris Lessing’s forthright and compendious two-volume autobiography, in which she virtually indexes every person from whom she has borrowed traits for characters, thereby only deepening the mystery of her power to make those characters live in our own imaginations. Ms. Munro presents a mixture of memoir, history and invention: “These are stories,” she emphatically claims.

Readers will want to prize out the many incidents in The View from Castle Rock recognizable from short stories that Ms. Munro has published over the past four decades, but there’s no saying which details are factual. This indeterminacy made me want to read the biography of Alice Munro listed in the bibliography of the new Everyman’s Library selection of her stories, Carried Away, and also the memoir published by her eldest daughter. At least that’s what I wanted as a reviewer; as a devoted fan, I just wanted to read Carried Away and to savor the most Munrovian sections, so to speak, of The View from Castle Rock: the ones that have the sickly glitter and thrill of perverse behavior, the intimacy of emotion, and the sinking through layers of perception and reversals of perspective—layers that are coherent but contradictory and seem to be the very stuff of experience.

Those are the hallmarks of the best Alice Munro fiction, and they were all on display in the sections of The View from Castle Rock excerpted in The New Yorker: the major, stunning portion of the title story, about the shipboard journey of the 19th-century Scots patriarch and his family to Canada; “The Ticket,” about a scholarship girl’s preparations for a marriage that will remove her from her unaspiring rural class; “Fathers,” about a friendship enforced between the smart farm girl and a much more indulged and nurtured child from Chicago; “Hired Girl,” about a job as teenage housekeeper in a wealthy summer home; and “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” in which a Salvation Army soldier is anything but salvation for the bookish teenage girl he regularly makes out with.

In The New Yorker, these stories seemed entirely of a piece with the two major flavors of Alice Munro’s best work: either autobiographical in tone or her own brand of historical fiction. (When Ms. Munro delves into a particular historical period, her characters have none of the generic or stilted qualities that usually damn the genre, nor do they have any silly proximity to figures of great public consequence.)

“The Ticket,” for instance, doesn’t seem more autobiographical than the stories in The Beggar Maid (1978), essentially about the same scholarship girl ambivalently marrying the same well-off boy, here called Michael. But the major characters, in the way Ms. Munro comes at that train wreck of a marriage in “The Ticket,” are a grandmother and an Aunt Charlie. Even if prototypes for these two actually existed, I doubt that their marriages did, at least not in the forms described in this story. Those forms are the story: the kindly aunt’s mythically happy match, the legendary and hidden ins-and-outs of the grandmother’s love for the man whose brother she married. Knowing whether any of this in fact happened to Ms. Munro’s granny (or whether Michael is in fact James Armstrong Munro, the man Ms. Munro married in 1951) could not make the story better or worse or more tense, disturbing and wonderful. What makes literary art is not the source material but the art, the shape given to it by the author. If biography is what you’re after, The View from Castle Rock will only taunt you.

The title story doesn’t seem any closer to personal history than, say, earlier Munro fictions like “Meneseteung,” with its excerpts from a coy small-town newspaper and lines of an old maid’s flowery verse made moving by the historical context Ms. Munro invents for it. “The View from Castle Rock” incorporates entries from a journal kept by a Munro ancestor on a trans-Atlantic voyage—a journal that’s both touching and comic in the way it fails to record the life-changing emotional detonations all around. Those are the events that make it a story, and Ms. Munro must have had to invent them all. The fact that the characters bear the names of Ms. Munro’s ancestors, or that she scans their visitable (I think) tombstones to deduce their later histories, has nothing to do with their grip on us. We’re hooked by familial provocations recognizably captured; by the evocation of delirium and physical misery in a life of unplannable pregnancy and un­medicated childbirth; by the psychic journey each family member makes toward an emotional promised land. That journey—here and always—is Ms. Munro’s great subject: The journey toward the happier place, and the fear or possibility or certainty that, in making it, you have split yourself and left behind what mattered to you.

The sharpest difference I felt between this quasi-memoir and the purer storytelling for which Alice Munro is justly celebrated has to do with that split. If you cobble together certain moments in The View from Castle Rock—where the narrator as a teenager tucks in her mother, who has Parkinson’s, and cooks for her brother and sister, or subdues herself to please her blue-collar father, who wrote fiction at the end of his life and had married a schoolteacher—you get a glimpse of what could have been a very different kind of autobiography, with the author as noble heroine and her parents as tragic characters out of Jude the Obscure. But Ms. Munro’s best short stories glory in a lack of gentility, or present an excruciation of callousness among the genteel, and there’s a gleeful highlighting of the shameful at the expense of anyone who has aspirations—as if, as an author, she takes the part of the crudest people she grew up with, the harshest part of the life she escaped, to jeer at the person she wanted to become; as if, as the jeerer, she can hold onto what’s been left behind.

At the end of The View from Castle Rock, she remembers holding to her ear a seashell and hearing “the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea”—in counterpoint to and in harmony with the voyage of her forebears. The author of that sentiment, the author of the memoir and history and autobiography gathered here, doesn’t seem split and certainly does not jeer. She’s calm and a little magisterial, as if she hadn’t spent a lifetime writing about a struggle both to avoid the hurts of love and, at the same time, to honor love and grasp its pleasures. In nonfiction, you can take as your subject the sense of having multiple personalities that make you write fiction, but you can’t manifest your storyteller’s kittens-in-a-sack personality as a cast of different characters, and you can’t write in a Babel of voices. Perhaps Alice Munro’s overtly autobiographical “I”—less animating, more like that of any number of intelligent and talented but not superlative writers—reflects a balance she’s achieved through writing superlative fiction.

Anna Shapiro is the author of a collection of essays and three novels. Her most recent, Living on Air (Soho), will be out in paperback in May.

Does anyone know if the word "coquette" was in vogue in Canada in the 1940's? Because if it was, you can be sure that the gravely gifted and always interesting short-story writer Alice Munro, born in rural Ontario in 1931, didn't get through high school without hearing a lot of it aimed in her direction.

Or maybe not. Maybe she was one of those teens who funneled all her energy into the track team, or the literary magazine, steering clear of those classmates who indulged in the immemorial practice of leading suitors on. In either case, I mean no disrespect to the grand dame of New Yorker contributors; let me hasten to add (or not so hasteningly-let me say it leisurely, loiteringly, taking my sweet coquettish time), that I intend the term in the most flattering sense. A literary coquette, let us stipulate, is someone who-like Ms. Munro in her worthy but rather hysterically overpraised latest collection, Runaway-piques our interest early, backtracks to fill out the context, ambles around the edges of our patience, holds all in abeyance while tension mounts, and delivers the goods at a time and place of her own choosing, if at all.

So what is the literary coquette's M.O.? Typically, she (or he) specializes in a mouth-watering come-on-certain car passengers, say, are driving around in their pajamas at midnight-about which she tells us nothing more for many pages. The characters-sometimes as many as three or four in the opening paragraphs-all know more than the reader and won't let on while the story ambles along, dilating tantalizingly and only gradually looping back to take care (or not) of our desperate narrative needs.

The technique is deliberate, reliable and (God knows) time-tested. Some of the world's favorite literary coquettes-Stephen King being perhaps the crudest and most transparently manipulative-compute their suspense by degrees in order to leave us hanging. Unless we're prone to the literary equivalent of blue balls, hanging's not necessarily a bad thing, even if we admit that the impulse to write this way-to deny the reader vital information or a central secret-is essentially withholding when not downright passive-aggressive.

Ms. Munro holds back well. She opens one of the eight stories in this, her 11th collection, with a green-faced man near a tree "fruited with jewels"; not till we turn the page are we told we're inside a Chagall print. The starkly titled stories most often feature a solitary woman with something of a gypsy air (or at least a free-form country sensibility), likely to be traveling the Canadian countryside in search of someone's old summer house in a state of composed semi-bewilderment, fueled by nostalgia to which she will never quite surrender, half ruing the lost years, half comforted that they are gone. Oddly buoyed by "lack of hope-genuine, reasonable, and everlasting," she's also sustained by a sense of solidarity with other women, both "stricken with respect" for the older role models of her youth and assured that her sister-sufferers are the sterner sex: "Women have always got something, haven't they, to keep them going? That men haven't got."

Strict with herself, as befits the class tease, she is brave and stoical, even when her beloved daughter (in the devastating story "Silence") runs off to a spiritual retreat and, year after agonizing year, opts not to return. Stiffened by inner resources, she appears in one story (perhaps standing in for the strong-jawed and frumpy-hatted Ms. Munro herself?) as "beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner ... was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles."

Often lapsing into reminiscence, these splendid women-just beyond our fingertips!-are burdened by a sense of propriety so old-fashioned that one of them is reluctant to call a young doctor by his first name, while another declines to use the word "breast" to describe where Cleopatra's asp mortally bit her. Somewhat stunted by the limitations of their time and place ("She gags on the word spirituality, which seems to take in … everything from prayer wheels to High Mass"), most are concerned with nothing more earth-shaking than the business of marriage proposals-who is egging on whom, who gets turned down for the third time and who is marked for spinsterhood. (In this regard, it may be of interest to note that "Some of the best-looking, best-turned-out women in town are those who did not marry.")

All these details are delivered in the manner of a prom queen of yore dispensing her favors to the football captain while she hums the school anthem-dispassionately, almost with a sense of disavowal. "She recalled now how the sun was coming up behind them, how she looked at Clark's hands on the wheel, the dark hairs on his competent forearms, and breathed in the smell of the inside of the truck, a smell of oil and metal, tools and horse barns. The cold air of the fall morning blew in through the truck's rusted seams." And then, of course, there's the chasteness of the act itself: "The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming." Of actual congress, nary a word.

So what's it like for a coquette to be teased herself? Ms. Munro's characters seem to thrive on it, whether they're pining for an estranged daughter's return, in one story, or counting the days that separate them from a potential lover, in another. (Ardently touching her fingers to the name of her beloved's hometown on a map, "she might have touched the very place he was in" and becomes aware "of a shine on herself, on her body, on her voice and all her doings," making her "walk differently and smile for no reason." The yearning gives purpose to her existence, filling her with "tension and defiance, the risk of her life.") And when the unspeakable occurs-when word comes down that the daughter has produced five grandchildren that the mother has no hope of meeting, or when the man seems to turn his lover away without a word of explanation-their corseted natures do them proud: Ms. Munro's characters won't let themselves go. Women in Runaway are given to weeping offstage; afterward, we see only their reddened eyes.

In the end, her sufferance bequeaths Ms. Munro the long view, the ability to witness and anticipate how small towns change over time, how old houses heave and give up the ghost, how families morph and vengeances are wreaked and love sparks anew, sometimes from the very ashes that seemed to cool decades earlier. Call it the wisdom of the literary coquette. One after the other, these stories, saturated with grieving insight, leave us "outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame"-with endings that are as satisfyingly appropriate as they are goose-bumpingly unforgettable. And that's a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.