Observation is Nobel winner Munro's great gift

In the collections of short stories Alice Munro has published since 1968, her great gift has been observation.

Whether her protagonist has just gotten a job in a turkey slaughterhouse or decided to take a road trip with her husband and two daughters across the northern United States, the details she notes are so precise and evocative they enter the reader's mind as though they were the reader's own memories - not similar, but that very thing.

I can't think of another writer whose every paragraph is so quietly powerful. Munro does not assert; she describes and suggests. The world she evokes seems at first mundane. When she started out in the 1960s and '70s, her stories were set close to home: rural Ontario, Vancouver, inside the house, or out in the farmyard. But she understands the meaning of every detail and its connection to the larger pulse of aspiration and disappointment, love and death.

Munro's earlier collections explored her life and background. The closest she came to writing a novel was her second book, Lives of Girls and Women.

Munro has said the short story stands on its own and does not have to be a writer's preparation for a novel, but perhaps what she learned from Lives of Girls and Women was that she had too many ideas for novels, that instead, she had to pour a novel's worth of insights into every story. And she has.

Her specialty is emotional depth - in setting the fuse (a girl witnesses her father carrying the body of a boy she knows who has drowned) and understanding the explosion (decades later, a mother looks across the surface of a swimming pool and realizes that her own child has disappeared).

When I was learning to write, Munro was not one of those chest-pummeling males of my parents' generation, the ones I had to turn away from because their voices were so loud. Her voice was practically a whisper, saying: "Look around you! Look within! But look closely, carefully. The world is more complex than you realize." In Munro's stories, the traditional female subjects of family relationships and marriage got deeper, more important, and I believed her.

Later in her career, Munro moved farther afield. She wrote about the lives of earlier generations of Canadians, and, eventually, about her own relatives, the Laidlaws, in her 2006 collection, The View From Castle Rock. These historical stories are as incisive and true as her autobiographical ones. With every word, the reader thinks, "Oh, that's the way it was." Emigration to the Western Hemisphere was not an epic journey, but a set of individual journeys, taken step by step, mundane and dangerous at the same time. The book as a whole illuminates both history and literature from the perspective of not the writer, but the ones who knew them, who had their own ideas and adventures. It is perhaps Munro's most ambitious and original work, but there is something self-effacing about it. As always, Munro seems to lose herself in her material rather than to be asserting claims to greatness.

But of course she is great, has been great almost since the beginning, a writer who seems to have found her voice and her subject and her audience immediately, to have set out with supreme confidence in her ability, not to know what she was talking about, but to find out what she must talk about.

The greatness of Alice Munro is that she is always observing, always curious. The Nobel committee honors itself by awarding her a prize.