These moments sparkle through life's malevolence. In ''Oranges and Apples,'' Murray, another cheated husband, savors the memory of one such epiphanic moment. Peace and patience had come to him just once when, as a child, he had been knocked unconscious in a schoolyard fight. In the longing to hold fast to something firm in these treacherous, shifty times, the geology of the Precambrian shield can comfort the resilient. Each is a marvel of construction, containing within it parallel narratives of inquiry and retrospection.
Retrospective wisdom softens the confusion of the present.
As always, Ms. Munro's tone is nostalgic and elegiac. A kind of compassion has been achieved for the ignorance and humiliation that spunky adolescents suffered through in earlier Munroesque towns such as Jubilee, Hanratty and now Logan. Ms. Munro is a writer of extraordinary richness and texture. Each short story is a mansion of many rooms. Each room is cluttered with gorgeous and eccentric furniture on each piece of which sit the many friends of her youth.