Dear Life

Since I enjoyed Runaway so much I thought I'd try another book of Alice Munro short stories.  Dear Life is actually her most recent short story collection (2012), and given that she's 89, probably the last one.  While these stories are still finely crafted, with the same understated and allusive rural canadian drama, I think I enjoyed Runaway more.  Munro seems to have moved further in the direction of short and inconclusive sketches.  They are models of economy and implication, as I think a short story should be, but somehow many of them left me wishing for more exploration or elaboration -- not an ending maybe, but perhaps more of a clear direction.  Most of these stories tail off like a trail that got washed away.  If this sort of thing interests you, it's worth noting that the last few stories, including the title story are announced as mostly autobiographical.  Strangely, these actually struck me as the weakest stories in the whole collection.