Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Munro at her most architecturally daring. These nine stories fold time like origami, jumping decades in a single paragraph, so that a woman's whole life becomes visible in one compressed gesture. The title story is a quiet masterpiece of misdirection; you think you know where it's going, and then it doesn't go there, and what actually happens is better.
The title story, a servant duped by a forged correspondence, is the one readers most often call the weakest of the nine, more plotted and pat than the quiet stories surrounding it, even though it gave the book its name and its film adaptation. A critic agrees, calling it “more contrivedly slick than the other stories.” Nearly every story turns on infidelity or a marriage collapsing under a late-revealed deception, and readers who go through the collection in one sitting say the pattern starts to feel formulaic. Munro's back-and-forth time jumps within a single story draw real complaints about tracking who's who, and at minimum one reader reports finishing with only “relief that it was over,” while another says flatly “I found myself in serious difficulty to appreciate anything.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
