All I can say is WOW – leave it to a frakkin’ legend like Alice Munro to screw my head back on about New Yorker fiction. If reading the weekly New Yorker story is like a dubious session of panning for gold, reading Free Radicals by Alice Munro is like finding a big fat nugget of the good stuff in your pan. She sets up this story with such straightforward innocence it totally had me fooled, though I really should have known better. I love how it builds a sort of quiet foreboding in the early paragraphs, even though you’re not really sure what to suspect. It’s got that rustic gothic mood most recently felt in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, and before you realize it the plot’s already turned on you. Several times at that. And while the ending might feel one turn too frivolous, this is brilliant stuff. I’m not even gonna summarize, you should just read it now. And I really need to be reading more Munro.
Not to sound lame but, she killed the guy with the “tea”, right? And she killed her husband too? I’m still absorbing the story.
Would like to discuss.
It doesn’t seem completely clear to me, either.
There is nothing in the story to suggest that she killed her husband or the intruder. He crashed the car because he got drunk on the wine (the bottle was empty).
Wow, guys, it’s awesome to see all these comments from short story readers, though I do hope we’re not spoiling the plot for anyone. Elizabeth, I’m inclined to think you’re right on both counts, though it seems like Munro is trying to toe the line a little too cleverly in creating just enough doubt to say otherwise; the policeman’s words at the end definitely made me suspect (like Shiffron) that it was the crash that actually killed him, provoking my reference to the “frivolous turn” (or should we call that The Prestige?). I thought the most confusing turn was figuring out not to take the story she tells the guy seriously – for a moment I thought that somehow she actually WAS her husband’s former lover she’d been reflecting about earlier, which was a very strange moment indeed. I also had to glance back because I thought she might’ve had some of the tea herself, meaning she’d developed her own immunity a la the iocane powder from The Princess Bride…
I know what a “free radical” is in chemistry. But I do not understand the reference in the story by Munro. Would appreciate any insights. Thanks