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IT IS DIFFICULT not to rhapsodize about the stories collected in Alice Munro's Open Secrets. "Magical" is the word that Peter Gzowski so enthusiastically used to describe them in his I994 Morningside interview with Munro (see Munro, interview), and both new and magical they are. There is a shift away from her previous work with this collection, as she explores narrative in a way that seems more celebratory, less caustic, than before. In an interview for the Paris Review, conducted the year that Open Secrets was published ( I994), Munro attributes the shift to a simple need for new material: "I'm doing less personal writing now than I used to for a very simple obvious reason. You use up your childhood.... Maybe it's advisable to move on to writing those stories which are more observation" ("Alice Munro" z44). These are finely observed stories written with Munro's signature use of realism, but the shift to "more observation" is not all that accounts for their newness. Munro has combined her realism with an entirely new plane of narration. As she mentioned to Gzowski, Open Secrets is "riskier" than any of her previous works:
I want to move away from what happened to the possibility of this happening or that happening and a kind of idea that life is not just made up of the facts, the things that happen, . . . but all the things that happen in fantasy, that might have happened, the . . . alternate life that can almost seem to be accompanying what we call our real lives.
It is this sense of parallel narratives, of the layering of narratives, on which I will focus as I read the many-layered "Vandals" as a coda to Open Secrets. "Vandals" brings together the elements of magic, romance, memory, and writing woven throughout the collection. Before I begin that reading, however, I want to flesh out my sense of the newness of these stories.
What struck me most forcibly about Open Secrets was the complexity of the stories, the striking similarities between them, and the sense I had of Munro's veneration for fiction. The stories have such multiple narrative threads, such richness and density, that it is not surprising that they overlap and intersect in...