Alice Munro draws on family archives

"The View from Castle Rock" by Alice Munro; Knopf ($25.95)

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Think of Canadian writer Alice Munro, and the phrase "historical fiction" doesn't readily come to mind. Yet several of her finest tales over the last dozen years - "Carried Away," "A Wilderness Station," "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" - have vividly immersed readers in the lives and manners of 90 to 150 years ago. (All three are included in Everyman's Library's recent "Carried Away: A Selection of Stories.")

Now, in her astonishing new collection, Munro delves into the past in a more methodical way, drawing partly on research she's done into her father's Scottish ancestry and partly on her recollection of family events over her own lifetime. In this new book, researched family history shades into fiction, and memoir is shaped with storytelling artistry. Or, as Munro puts it in her foreword, "You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on."

Result: a far-ranging, richly symphonic suite of stories that outshines even Munro's earlier masterworks, "Lives of Girls and Women" and "Open Secrets."

"The View from Castle Rock" falls into two halves. The first, "No Advantages," traces the progress of the Laidlaws (Munro's maiden name was Laidlaw) from the near-barren Ettrick Valley in southern Scotland to the backwoods of southern Ontario. The second, "Home," segues into Munro's memories of her parents, schoolmates and neighbors in Wingham, Ontario, where she was born in 1931, then leads up to the point in her life when she starts looking into her family's earlier history, thus allowing the book to come full circle.

The Laidlaws of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, Munro discovers, had the writing bug (James Hogg, author of "The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner," was a Laidlaw cousin), and Munro takes advantage of this, building her stories around their surviving letters and journals. Early on, she latches onto certain contradictions in the Laidlaw temperament.

"Self-dramatization got short shrift in our family," she writes. "They spoke of calling attention. Calling attention to yourself. The opposite of which was not exactly modesty but strenuous dignity and control, a sort of refusal. The refusal to feel any need to turn your life into a story, either for other people or yourself."

This tension between stoical reticence and the storytelling impulse, between pragmatic conduct and impractical pursuits (especially reading), is a constant throughout the book. It's present in the book's title story, which follows the family's move to Canada (at the instigation of 60-year-old patriarch James Laidlaw); in "Illinois," in which a baby's disappearance signals another character's deep reluctance to join the rest of the family in Ontario; and in "The Wilds of Morris Township," which revisits the setting of "A Wilderness Station" with its tale of a brother's death in "pioneer Ontario."

Viewpoint is a fluid affair in these stories - we get excerpts from the archives, Munro's imagined version of events and then her own commentary on what she's up to.

In the book's second half, Munro's more personal memory pieces dart with equal agility from vantage point to vantage point. Here we have a series of firsts: her first awareness of the tension between her parents; her first sexual awareness; her first job away from home; her first marriage, heightening her nascent consciousness of class differences (Munro-the-social-historian has never been sharper); her first serious brush with mortality.

Portraits of her father, a fox farmer just barely getting by, and her mother, whose sufferings from Parkinson's disease ("so little known then, and so bizarre in its effects") were taken at first to be signs of her "need for attention, for bigger dimensions in her life," cover territory familiar from 1971's "Lives of Girls and Women." But here Munro draws on the added perspective that 35 more years and a drummed-in awareness of human frailty can bring.

Her portrait of her younger, protean self ("the entirely disjointed and dissimilar personalities I seemed to be made up of") is just as good. And her skewering of adolescent temperament is spot-on: "The thought of having a little corner of myself come to light, and be truly understood, stirred up alarm, just as much as being taken no notice of stirred up resentment."

In these story-chapters, snap judgments that Munro made when she was young are deftly dovetailed with later insights, regrets, codas. Crucial factors she failed to understand are brought to light-years later. Statements or sentiments she thought of as lies or lip-service to convention turn out to have a truth or weight to them.

There's humor here, too, and marvelous description, and hilarious humor-in-description. (At one point, the teenage Munro sees a boozy, married 40-year-old man who may be flirting with her as an "amorous tame crocodile.")

Each story-chapter pulls you so snugly into its own particular universe that it comes as a shock to realize, at the end of the book, that Munro has covered 200 years of family life in less than 350 pages.

If, while reading a history book, you've ever been startled by the appearance of the first event you actually remember, or that you recall your long-dead grandfather or great-grandmother telling you about, you'll have a notion of how Munro transforms archival past into living past in "The View from Castle Rock" - and how she rides the waves of that past into the present.

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(c) 2006, The Seattle Times. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.