'Too Much Happiness': A miscellaneous collection of Alice Munro's work

'Too Much Happiness'

by Alice Munro

Knopf, 304 pp., $25.95

Don't be deceived by the title of Alice Munro's new story collection, "Too Much Happiness." An unusual number of madmen — and the occasional madwoman — populate its pages. And they're not exactly reveling in bliss.

All 10 stories in the collection are finely, even ingeniously, crafted. But to this reader the book is a slight letdown after the intricately linked tales of 2006's "The View from Castle Rock." Where "Rock" was a circular symphony of dovetailed narratives covering 200 years of family history, "Happiness" is an unapologetic miscellany.

It contains some stellar work, with several tales — "Face," "Fiction," "Some Women" — teasing enough mystery and ambiguity from ordinary situations to make them feel as complex as life itself. Munro, now 78, relishes the long, layered perspectives through which she can view youthful experience. And the book's title story, a novella about the last days of Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky (1850-1891), is a reminder of how fine and fluid her excursions into historical fiction can be.

Still, it's those madmen who keep stepping into the limelight. Murderers, cultists, a withered voyeur ... it's as though Munro, after perfecting her ability to illuminate everyday experience, is now bent on exploring extremes.

"Dimensions," about a young woman whose life has obviously been disrupted by some trauma, is a case in point. As we get glimpses in flashback of her controlling husband, whom she's come to see as "some terrible accident of nature," we know something bad is coming. The bargains of affection between domineering male and subservient female don't bode well — but the price they exact still comes as a shock. "Dimensions" merits rereading to appreciate both its cunning structure and out-of-left-field coda.

Still, it's "Face," "Fiction" and "Some Women," with their more ordinary premises, that provide subtler satisfactions. "Face," narrated by a man rejected by his father and overprotected by his mother because of the birthmark on his face, encapsulates a whole life, complete with might-have-beens and belated re-evaluations of other people's long-ago behavior. "Fiction" plays with perspective, as a music teacher meets a writer who may have been a former student of hers — and may also be the daughter of the woman who helped put her first marriage to an end.

In "Some Women," a 13-year-old girl hired to keep an eye on a young man dying of leukemia has to divine the rivalries between his wife, stepmother and a pushy masseuse who may be putting the make on him. The the girl's dilemma: deciding where her loyalties lie.

The collection's title story feels almost disconnected from the rest of the book, as it captures the trajectories of a whole life taken from the pages of mathematics history. Weaving vivid flashbacks into a framework narrative about Kovalevsky's difficult train journey from Nice to Stockholm just before her death, Munro slips us into the mind of a woman who's torn between multiple loyalties, duties and desire, while enjoying professional success. There's a line from "Fiction" that sums up the dynamic informing "Too Much Happiness" and other choice selections in this book: "It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness — however temporary, however flimsy — of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another."

That's essence-of-Munro, right there — and this collection, in its best moments, delivers it with instinctive acuity.