The View from Castle Rock
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK Stories By Alice Munro Knopf. 349 pp. $25.95 My mother's childhood was shaped by a small town named Boorowa in the flat plains west of Australia's Great Dividing Range, and the stories she told of her years there shaped my childhood in its turn. Boorowa and my mother's tales about it were much on my mind as I read Alice Munro's latest collection of stories, The View From Castle Rock. Munro's rural Canadian settings might be a planet away, and snow-blasted rather than sun-baked, but they are similar places of nickel-edged wood stoves, worn linoleum and worn-out hearts, where adults move tight-lipped through accustomed chores and a child in search of signs of love will need to crack a hard code if she is to find any. ...-
