Life stories

The View From Castle Rock
By Alice Munro
Knopf, 349 pp., $25.95

In the 1930s and '40s, when Alice Munro was growing up in the rural landscape of Huron County, Ontario, she rode a man's bicycle, lay under a blooming apple tree to watch the sky, considered having sex with a boy in a hayloft -- an idea interrupted by the horsewoman who owned the place and fired off a shotgun to frighten them away. Munro was a dreamy, stubborn girl -- the older of two -- who was too smart for her own good, or, by her own description, "strong and bright enough but who often seemed to be self-centered and mysteriously incompetent." These traits did not prevent her from a level of remarkable industry: With a mother suffering from Parkinson's, she scrubbed the house within an inch of its life and was sent out as a hired girl as soon as she was old enough to be paid for her work. The family was poor or struggling not to be: Presbyterian Scots who had migrated to Canada in the early 19th century, beholden to the unsparing laws of living off the land. Her father trapped foxes until her mother figured out that raising them was easier, and for a time they had a fox-farming enterprise, wherein the father tanned the animals and the mother sold fox stoles -- the head and little paws intact -- to a fancy hotel in the province.

The business didn't last -- long-haired fur was going out of fashion -- and her father found work as a night watchman at the local foundry, where he washed the floors and took solace in the night time quiet of the place. He told her then he thought maybe it was the best time of his life, when you were "old enough that you could see that a lot of things you might have wanted out of life you would never get."

I suppose it is brazen of me to assume that these details, gleaned from "The View From Castle Rock," are fully autobiographical; Munro herself, in describing an ancestor's journals, refers to "canny lying of the sort you can depend upon a writer to do." And she insists in the foreword that, in writing these stories, she was trying to trace the emergence of a self -- adhering to some factual reality, "but not enough to swear on." Still, readers of Munro's fiction over the years cannot help recognizing the austere Ontario of her heart's imagination; it is also impossible to separate the formal structure of these "stories" from a desire to know and understand the fanciful, headstrong girl who became the adult master. When she worked one summer as domestic help for a wealthy family on an island off Pointe au Baril, on Georgian Bay, she wrote a lurid, fictional letter to her best friend back home; the invented details included tipsy guests throwing up over the railing, and a lecherous employer fondling her in the kitchen. "So hold your breath for the next installment," she wrote her friend. "Entitled, 'Sordid Adventures of a Kitchen Maid.' Or 'Ravaged on the Rocks of Georgian Bay.' "

She tore up the letter; embarrassed by her misuse of the word "ravaged," she then realized she was only trying to tart up her own uneventful summer. But to read about this now, through the eyes and memory of one of the finest living writers, is a revelatory delight. The installments of "The View From Castle Rock," while hardly as sordid or ravaged as the young Alice's fantasies, have the structure of fiction and the lure of being drawn from the blueprint of "truth." The result is a work of aching authenticity -- more desultory and less commanding than Munro's finest fiction, but still compelling in its search for the sovereign young self.

That "view" of the title is what the idea of America looked like from the wild shores of Scotland, from where Munro's ancestors, the Laidlaw family, set out for America in 1818. The first third of the book is devoted to these hardships -- the ship's voyage, the deaths of children, the plight of women sometimes so severe that a "poor" was placed in front of their names: Poor Maggie, Poor Jane. The majority of the book, though, is devoted to stories based on Munro's immediate family of origin: her father, a farm boy who read James Fenimore Cooper and learned to hunt and trap; her mother, a dramatic and demanding woman whose Parkinson's often seemed, to her sad and weary family, another way of asking for more than anyone had to give. It is an unsentimental and bracing portrait of those years -- Munro can deliver a body blow with one or two stripped-down declarative sentences. Take the description of how to kill a captured fox, in order not to spoil the trap: "You stun him with the blow of a long, strong stick, and then put your foot on his heart."

Three stories in the book, "Fathers," "Lying Under the Apple Tree," and "Hired Girl," bear the fullness of Munro's fiction; if they are drawn from emotional memory, she remembers everything: the smell of boys and hay and Lifebuoy soap , the weight of shame, the utter consolation of an unread book. Her characters (particularly a horrid stepmother) reveal or betray themselves by their own words. The reluctant heroine here is a girl who scrubbed the stove until it shone and read Shakespeare on the sly; her family worried she would never marry, for some signal, "clear as a warning bell, scattered the possible boyfriends and potential husbands out of my path." That path took her through and out, and she became the writer who forgot nothing and made use of everything -- turning a world of exquisite detail and emotion into one of the great imagined landscapes of contemporary fiction. With its telltale signposts and realities dressed as fiction, "The View From Castle Rock" is a learner's guide to understanding the mind that reinvents the world as story. And it is hard not to love the half-insolent, intrepid girl within.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.