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PARTISAN REVIEW
house. She thinks that this lie counts as one of the "moments of kind–
ness and reconciliation [that] are worth having." The different ver–
sions of events seem to have no more relative value than the layers of
wallpaper she sees in the corner of the room.
In "Eskimo," the strangest of these stories and perhaps the most
effective in its use of a shifting point of view - a device used too
casually in other stories - the sense of missed connections, of layers
rather than sequences, takes a bizarre psychological twist as the
heroine attempts to rescue a young Eskimo girl who she thinks is be–
ing abducted on an airplane . Herself en route to Tahiti on an in–
voluntary vacation arranged by her boss, the lover with whom she is
obsessed, Mary Jo fantasizes about the couple, tries to talk the
drunk girl into confiding in her, and then stares in fascination as the
Eskimo kisses and licks the man's face "in a trance of devotion."
Stricken by desire, "sudden and punishing as a rush of loose earth
down a mountainside," and then plunged into a nightmare in which
her efforts to help the girl are thwarted by the logic of dreams, Mary
Jo awakens to the "duet of eloquent, innocent snores" and the story
concludes with simple irony: "This is the beginning of her holiday."
The passions that drive the characters in this story may be thwarted,
but obsession is refreshing after the lukewarm inconsequence of
some of the other stories in this collection, particularly "The Moon in
the Orange Street Skating Rink" and "Fits."
The one memorable moment of humor in the collection is in
the longest story, "A Queer Streak ." The heroine, Violet, sacrifices
what promises to be a normal, fulfilling life as a minister's wife when
she confesses to her fiance that her sister had terrorized their parents
by leavi.ng threatening notes around their farm. The odd sister goes
on to live a normal life, but Violet actually becomes interesting and
transcends the morose literalness of small-town living one night
when she leaves a pudding outside to cool and returns to find that
the snow has buried it. She goes "tramping around in the snowy yard
after dark, calling, 'Pudding, pudding, here pudding!' as if it were a
dog .. . elaborating the performance, stopping to whistle ." One
wishes there were more moments like this and fewer efforts at
poignancy, particularly at the conclusions of the stories. The image
of a "lily floating on the cloudy river water, perfect and familiar" that
ends "Circle of Prayer" seems stale, rather than radiant , as intended.
While Munro's stories chronicle the attempt to escape from ec–
centricity or boredom without abandoning responsibility to middle-
