Alice Munro’s latest story in the New Yorker is called Deep-Holes. You can read it here.
To me the sheer scope of this piece ends up getting in its own way. The story spans at least a couple decades, and its characters (a family with three children) pass through time so quickly that it’s difficult to get a lock on their personalities, ambitions and perceptions. The story is a third person limited from the perspective of Sally, the mother of the three children and spouse of an academic geologist. Munro’s prose is crisp as always and I like the theme of the estranged favorite son, but some of the plot points make these characters turn more quickly than I feel comfortable believing: an accident changes a boy forever, a sudden death in the family is received differently than one might expect, a dramatic fire (Munro’s own adjective) brings the family back together. The story does possess one of the more satisfyingly ambiguous endings I’ve read, but overall the piece still ends up being a little too cold from all the temporal distance it needs to cover.
i have read all the works by Alice Munro so far till The View From Castle ROck, but none of it had a story titled Deep-Holes, so in which collection does it appear, and cnsidering the fact that i am in Indian, i dont think i could get to read it if it is a story that appeared in NewYorker/a journal/a magazine. but i do like to read the story if u can give me a link to it, online. could u?
Hey Neethu,
Thanks for the comment, and glad to see the enthusiasm about Munro. Seeing as this story was published in the past year, my guess is you’ll have to wait for her next collection to see it in book form. I’m not sure if you noticed the “You can read it here” part at the beginning of this post, but well…you can read it on the New Yorker website page that’s linked there. All new New Yorker fiction is available on their site. Or perhaps you’re actually implying that the New Yorker website itself is blocked from those in India, to which I can only say: that is a horrific tragedy.