Live actors dressed in ice-hockey, ski, and snow-boarding gear have been holed up in the two-story tall vinyl dome that's 20 feet in diameter since Friday to promote tourism in Ontario. The actors are supposed to "create wintry scenes from inside while a variety of wintry activities like ice sculpting demonstrations and ice wine tastings will be offered to those outside," according to the Web site of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

On Sunday night, two ski bunnies huddled inside the giant, transparent orb beneath polyester snow flurries, sipping coffee from familiar burgandy snow-flaked cardboard cups, causing The Observer to initially mistake the bizarre scene for a Starbucks holiday campaign.

Mr. Gosling is nominated for Best Actor in an already talent-heavy category. There’s front-runner Forest Whitaker, sentimental favorite and dark horse Peter O’Toole, the heartwarming Will Smith, and Leonardo DiCaprio with his apparently pitch-perfect South African accent (bling-bang!). Mr. Gosling, as a struggling, drug-addicted junior-high-school teacher in Half Nelson, is a welcome interloper.

The film was made for under a million dollars, gobbled up by ThinkFilm at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and quietly released last August. Thanks in part to Mr. Gosling’s much-raved-over performance, the movie has continued to build buzz throughout the awards season.

With his lanky good looks and emotive brow, the 26-year-old actor had already made a name for himself in the loveably sappy The Notebook, and won critical acclaim for 2001’s The Believer. But in Half Nelson, Mr. Gosling gives a startling performance. In a brief scene, his character finds himself buying crack from one of his young students in a seedy motel room. The moment is wordless, but Mr. Gosling manages to convey a lifetime of emotions: disappointment, shame, regret and devastating bemusement at the inevitability of life.

Half Nelson was filmed in Red Hook and Fort Greene, where Mr. Gosling lived, and where he worked on winning over the neighborhood, trying to sweet-talk the local ladies sitting out on their stoops. “They didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” he said, though he did start receiving some homemade carrot cake. “But they saw I was working so hard for it,” he said.

Mr. Gosling was talking via phone from his home in Los Angeles after a recent two-week trip to Uganda. He was scouting for a movie he’s written and will direct this summer, about the effect of war on children. On his trip he met a 3-year-old girl named Joyce who had once been wrapped in a carpet by the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and set on fire. Eighty percent of her body is now covered in burns, and she suffers from tuberculosis and H.I.V. Mr. Gosling is trying to set up a fund for her.

Of Hollywood’s latest interest in all things Africa, he said: “I just hope it’s not a fad, you know? I hope it’s indicative of a greater awareness of this [continent] that is in deep suffering. We live in plain view of all of them—in this completely excessive way—while they starve.”

He acknowledged that in the current climate of Angelina Jolie and Bono humanitarianism, celebrity do-gooding is often viewed with skepticism.

“It’s like people nominate regular people to be celebrities to live in a way they can’t and it’s like your job to live above your means and live excessively,” he said. “If at any point people try to move away from that and try to use all this excess luxury around them to help raise awareness of important issues, it’s almost like a betrayal. Like you’re not doing job of living it up … people are like, I didn’t make you famous to bum me out.”

Mr. Gosling was born in Ontario, Canada, and first got a whiff of showbiz life while co-starring with Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on the New Mickey Mouse Club talent show from 1993 to 1995.

“When I got hired on that show, they thought that I could do more than I actually could,” he said. “When I got there they instantly realized that I wasn’t as talented as the rest of them. You’d be hard-pressed to find me in that show; I’d come in at the beginning and at the end—sometimes a little something in the middle—but for the most part, I didn’t work very much. I spent the years riding roller coasters and hanging out in Disney World.”

But quite unlike his onetime co-stars, or other Us Weekly favored targets, Mr. Gosling manages to fly under tabloid radar—even with a romance with A-lister (and fellow Canuck) Rachel McAdams.

“We live a simple life—or try to,” Mr. Gosling said. “That’s what we come from, and that’s what we are. We try to maintain that at all costs. It sounds like it’s harder than it is. I think it’s probably exhausting to go out to all those places and get photographed. It’s easier not to. There are certain restaurants that you go to and know they’re going to take your picture.

“And,” he added, “the food’s not that good.”

Mr. Gosling is slated to star in three movies released in 2007, with the first one, Fracture, out in April. “Anthony Hopkins,” he said quickly, speaking of his decision to make the film. “How many opportunities am I going to get to work with Anthony Hopkins?”

But he’s continuing to duck and weave the blockbusters, choosing instead the smaller, quirkier projects and less-well-known directors. “It wouldn’t work out well for anyone,” he said, laughing at the idea of his playing a superhero, but he insisted that he doesn’t discriminate against budget.

“To be honest, I think I’m looking for something that there’s not a lot of,” he said. “Even if Hollywood movies pretend to be about people, they’re still science fiction. ’Cause nobody looks like that or talks like that. It’s fantasy. And independent movies are often so humorless and dark and bleak that they’re nothing like life either.

“I’m looking for something that strikes some kind of balance—things that aren’t about characters but about people,” he continued. “I think there are many stories I’d like to see that aren’t being made. Life is full of endless material.”

*UPDATE: Our math was corrected (we kid you not) in an email from a former Goldman Sachs executive director: "Please note that 1 square meter = 10.76 square feet. Based on the correct conversion ratio, prices per square foot in Paris seem to be in line with New York." Is that true? Can any Francophile mathematicians set us straight?

- Max Abelson

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.