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In "Everything Here is Touchable and Mysterious," Alice Munro recalls an annual event in her early life, the flooding of the Maitland River, Which "came upon [the people of Wingham, Ontario] with a Biblical inevitability" every spring (33). It is not surprising, therefore, that drownings are frequent in her fiction.1 In Lives of Girls and Women, Del, the narrator, describes the suicides of two characters who drown themselves in the flooded Wawanash River, and, after her lover nearly drowns her, she plans a novel in which the heroine also drowns herself In addition, four later Munro stories"Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You," "Miles City, Montana," "Walking on Water," and "Pictures of the Ice"-include characters who drown. In the first two stories, the drownings are accidental; in the latter two, however, it is not completely clear whether the drownings are accidents or suicides. In "Walking on Water," Frank McArter is a disturbed young man who may have committed suicide after murdering his parents. In "Pictures of the Ice," Austin Cobbett has most likely arranged his suicidal drowning to look accidental. In "The Love of a Good Woman," the title story of her latest collection, Munro complicates these frequent and sometimes mysterious drownings in a double way.2 The drowning of Mr. Willens, the town optometrist, in the flooded Peregrine River may be suicide, an accident, or a murder disguised to look like an accident. After Enid, the protagonist, has been told that it was a murder, she plans to confront the alleged murderer, with whom she is in love, and imagines his drowning her in a scenario somewhat similar to the drowning-murder scene in Dreiser's An American Tragedy. But the mystery of Mr. Willens's drowning is never solved, and no second drowning ever occurs because Enid, after an agonizing internal debate, decides not to tell what she has been told.
"Tell" is the operative verb structuring this metafictional, many-voiced narrative about narration, a story that not only tells how and why stories are told or not told-or retold and reinterpreted-but also compels its readers to participate in the narrative, interpretive, and reinterpretive process. The story is introduced by a narrator whose description of a collection in a contemporary local museum interjects doubts about the provenance of...