The archetypal Alice Munro protagonist is the smart restless girl from a poor small burg where nobody goes to college—or that girl grown up, or grown old. Her parents are dead, absent, or somehow indisposed. She marries up or marries down or doesn't marry at all, and the resulting displacement leaves her vulnerable, conspicuous. She abandons her hometown for university on scholarship, or she stays and devours books, and either way her family and neighbors decide she is a snob. She has affairs, or imagines herself to. She is something of a fantasist, and those fantasies both soothe her and stir... More >>>