Recalling Lives Altered, in Ways Vivid and Untidy

Alice Munro, one of the foremost short-story writers of her generation, creates tales that have the scope and amplitude of novels: whole lives are condensed into a handful of pages, the progress of love is charted over the years as passion gives way to restlessness or deeper commitment or something more ambiguous.

Her most powerful stories (in collections like “The Moons of Jupiter” and “Friend of My Youth”) have the complexity of small orchestral pieces: they move back and forth in time, gradually uncovering the patterns in characters’ lives; revealing how emotions are handed down generation to generation; how relationships between men and women and parents and children mutate over time; and how disappointments, hopes and losses reverberate through the echo chamber of family.

Ms. Munro’s latest collection, “Dear Life” — like her lumpy 2004 collection “Runaway” — gives us stories that have a similar density but that are less elliptical and less psychologically complex. With the exception of four revealing semi-autobiographical pieces that close the volume, most of the stories here pivot around a melodramatic event, and many have ironic, O. Henry-esque conclusions that can feel overly stage-managed.

People’s lives often change abruptly in Ms. Munro’s stories (by accident, bad luck or calculated risk), but her earlier tales tended to give us a kaleidoscopic views of such events, conveying both the precariousness of daily life and the subjectivity of memory. Ms. Munro, now 81, seems to have increasingly turned toward stories with more tightly plotted narratives, more closure and more Aesop-like morals — in sharp contrast to the many artists, like Tennessee Williams and Claude Monet, whose work grew increasingly abstract in later years. There is a terseness to these tales (more than half of which have a single word for a title), a sense of impatience on the part of the author.

As for the people in these stories, they too are drawn with sharper outlines and less chiaroscuro than their predecessors. Though Ms. Munro has not become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on the selfishness, irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.

“To Reach Japan” describes how a poet leaves her young daughter alone on a train to have a quick assignation with a young actor she’s just met, only to return to the compartment and find her daughter missing. “Corrie” tells how a wealthy young woman with a bad leg becomes involved with a married man, who tells her that they are being blackmailed by a former employee who’s threatening to tell his wife about their affair. And “Amundsen” recounts how a doctor methodically sets about seducing a young teacher who has arrived in his remote town to teach children with tuberculosis — how he invites her to dinner, gets her into bed, proposes marriage and then coldly dumps her and puts her on a train back to Toronto.

Many of these stories are set in small Canadian towns — much like the ones in which Ms. Munro has spent much of her life — and many look back on childhood or youthful events from a vantage point decades later. The teacher in “Amundsen” is now a married woman — not happily it would seem — and still a bit in thrall to the dastardly doctor who hurt her so many years ago.

As for the narrator of “Gravel,” she remains haunted by her 9-year-old sister’s decision to throw her dog and herself into the chilly waters of a gravel pit to get the attention of their adulterous mother — and her own failure to summon help promptly. Instead of getting help from her mother or her mother’s lover right away, the narrator recalls that she just sat down in front of their trailer “and waited for the next thing to happen.”

A woman in “Haven” is more passive-aggressive than just plain passive. Although it’s the 1970s, the narrator’s aunt spends most of her time obediently deferring to her antisocial husband and his peremptory opinions. Then one evening she recklessly invites the neighbors and her husband’s estranged sister — who is performing in a concert at the local town hall — over for drinks while her husband is at the County Physicians Annual General Meeting and Dinner. Her story, however contrived, echoes that of many of the women in Ms. Munro’s fiction: they are caught on the margins of changing cultural mores, and torn between freedom and domesticity, independence and the need to belong.