Alice Munros Best

walls with “a number of admonitions, pious and cheerful and mildly bawdy:”
    THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD
BELIEVE IN THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AND THOU SHALT BE SAVED
    Why did Flo have those, when she wasn’t even religious? They were what people had, common as calendars.
    Christianity is “what people had”—and in Canada, church and state were never separated along the lines laid down in the United States. Prayers and Bible readings were daily fare in publicly funded schools. This cultural Christianity has provided ample material for Munro, but it is also connected with one of the most distinctive patterns in her image-making and storytelling.
    The central Christian tenet is that two disparate and mutually exclusive elements—divinity and humanity—got jammed together in Christ, neither annihilating the other. The result was not a demi-god, or a God in disguise: God became totally a human being while remaining at the same time totally divine. To believe that Christ was only a man or to believe he was simply God were both declared heretical by the early Christian church. Christianity thus depends on a denial of either/or classifying logic and an acceptance of both-at-once mystery. Logic says that A cannot be both itself and non-A at the same time, Christianity says it can. The formulation “A but also non-A” is indispensable to it.
    Many of Munro’s stories resolve themselves—or fail to resolve themselves—in precisely this way. The example that first comes tomind—though there are many—is from
Lives of Girls and Women
, in which the teacher who’d staged the high school’s airy and joyful operettas drowns herself in the river.
    Miss Farris in her velvet skating costume … Miss Farris
con brio …
Miss Farris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash River, six days before she was found. Though there is no plausible way of hanging those pictures together—if the last one is true then must it not alter the others?—they are going to have to stay together now.
    For Munro, a thing can be true, but not true, but true nonetheless. “It is real and dishonest,” thinks Georgia, of her remorse, in “Differently.” “How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up,” says the narrator of “The Progress of Love.” “It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them. I haven’t stopped believing it.” The world is profane
and
sacred. It must be swallowed whole. There is always more to be known about it than you can ever know.

    In a story called “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” jealous Et describes her sister’s former lover—a promiscuous ladies’ man—and the look he gives to every woman, a look “that made him seem to want to be a deep-sea diver diving down, down through all the emptiness and cold and wreckage to discover the one thing he had set his heart on, something small and precious, hard to locate, as a ruby maybe on the ocean floor.”
    Munro’s stories abound in such questionable seekers and well-fingered ploys. But they abound also in such insights: within any story, within any human being, there may be a dangerous treasure, a priceless ruby. A heart’s desire.
    Margaret Atwood
    MARGARET ATWOOD is the author of
The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin
, and
Oryx and Crake.

ROYAL BEATINGS
    ROYAL BEATING.
That was Flo’s promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating.
    The word
Royal
lolled on Flo’s tongue, took on trappings. Rose had a need to picture things, to pursue absurdities, that was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of taking this threat to heart she pondered: How is a beating royal? She came up with a tree-lined avenue, a crowd of formal spectators, some white horses and black slaves. Someone knelt, and the blood came leaping out like banners. An occasion both savage and splendid. In real life they didn’t approach such dignity, and it was only Flo who tried to supply the event with some high air of necessity and regret. Rose and her father soon got beyond anything presentable.
    Her father was king of the royal beatings. Those Flo gave never amounted to much; they were quick cuffs and slaps dashed off while her attention remained elsewhere. You get out of my road, she would say. You mind your own business. You take that look off your face.
    They lived behind a store in Hanratty, Ontario. There were four of them: Rose, her father, Flo, Rose’s young half brother, Brian. The store was