WITH STORIES OF THE EVERYDAY, FICTION TURNS GOSSIP TO SACRAMENT

Author: By John Dufresne

Date: SUNDAY, January 11, 1998

Page: F2

Section: Books

My job was to sit away from the table and to listen, to fetch another pack of Pall Malls from my mother's purse, to bring Pepere his next bottle of Tadcaster ale and ``Go see why your brother's crying, tell him if I have to get off this chair, he's going to be a sorry young man.'' The adults talked about what on earth the Barry boy might be up to in that enormous tent he's set up in his back yard next door and about what a fine job the landlord is doing with the property -- but isn't he a little strict with his kids? -- about what Bunny Bourassa was up to at Moore's Pharmacy, and about why George Lucier spends every night at the Queen Elena. I listened to my grandmother tell us about my grandfather's latest drinking bout, how he shot up the radio, emptied the icebox, and hid all the food under his bed. I heard stories my teenage aunts told about the boys at the Jay-Dee Grille, the motorcycle boys who looked like the Everly brothers; stories about the people we'd just seen that morning at Mass and the no-good they were up to, about ``Whozee'' and ``What's-His-Name's-Wife,'' and don't they have any shame? And about who's sick, and who's pregnant, and who owes money to whom.

Gossip. I loved it. And still do. It's what brought me to literature. And now it's my job. That's what writing fiction is, it turns out -- spreading the gossip about made-up people. At the heart of every story and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble. And we can't get enough of it. Gossip means you want to know about life, about what it's like to be a human being. About how that feels. It's a recognition that people are more important than ideas (including ideas of the Divine) and that all history is local. It is an acknowledgment that we come to understand the world one three-decker at a time. We say, Just this morning on Grafton Street, the husband who loved his wife realized that he could no longer live with her. And then we wonder why. Gossip may be indiscreet, but it's not idle. It need not be malicious, but it must be inquisitive. Like the best fiction, gossip is intimate; it's about people you know, people just like you -- provincials in trouble.

In my grandmother's kitchen, I learned that people in the neighborhood lived quiet but important, funny, and often heartbreaking lives. I learned that people who we thought would always be around sometimes pass from our lives. I learned about the aunt I never knew, who had Down syndrome, and died in infancy, what that was like, to have death enter the wrong room -- to come for the child and not the mother.

Alice Munro transforms gossip into high art in her collection ``Open Secrets'' (Vintage, $13 paperback). Munro is, I think, our finest working writer, an enchanter who lifts us out of our world and carries us to the higher ground of her fictional Ontario, a world at once more vivid, compelling, and significant than our own. She writes mesmerizing stories of desolation and writes them, my friend Dick McDonough says, like a grandmother with a dagger under her cape.

Munro's stories are complex and luminous meditations on the failure of intimacy and the longing to connect. The stories operate on a kind of chaos theory wherein, say, an Australian's whimsical decision to visit an old friend in Canada will change the life of a woman he has never met because that woman will be invited to a lunch, because her brother died and she's alone, and because they needed a sixth, and at lunch she will hold her fork in such a captivating way that the visitor from Australia will be charmed, will commence a long-distance courtship. And as her life is changed forever, so are the lives of everyone else in her rural town. We do not live our lives in isolation. In Munro's world -- and in ours, she convinces us -- chance is more consequential than choice. And there are no answers. Life is not a question, after all; it's an exclamation.

Leo Tolstoy's neighbor Bibikov, the snipe hunter, lived with his mistress, Anna Pirogova -- a juicy bit of business already. But then he shifted his affections to his children's German governess; decided, in fact, to marry the Fraulein. Anna's jealousy turned to rage. She ran away, wandering the countryside, crazed with grief. Then she threw herself under a freight train at the Yasenki station. The following day, Tolstoy went to the station, attracted by the scandal of the woman who has given all for love, who had died this trite, if tragic, death. He learned of a letter she had written to Bibikov: ``You are my murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like, you can see my corpse on the rails at Yasenki.'' Tolstoy turned the shocking incident into one of the world's great novels, ``Anna Karenina'' (Penguin Classics, $9.95 paperback).

A bit of gossip about a new lady on the esplanade begins Anton Chekhov's extraordinary story, ``The Lady With the Pet Dog.'' That story and many others of Chekhov's best -- ``In the Ravine,'' ``Heartache,'' ``The Kiss,'' ``Gooseberries'' -- are included in ``The Portable Chekhov'' (Viking, $14.95 paperback).

With Chekhov, perception is genius. He looked at the world an inch at a time and found the sublime in the mundane. He wrote with perception, elegance, humor, and brutal honesty. He knew that any fool can face a crisis; it's the day-to-day that wears us out. Our most heroic act is to confront the relentless oppression of the routine. It's not our mortal sins that condemn us, but our venial sins, which we commit a hundred times a day until they become who we are.

And he knew the awful truth at the center of our existence, which is the truth that we are dying and we don't want to be, that everything we love will vanish. And yet in the face of annihilation we refuse to submit. We go on loving; we find comfort in community. We gather in kitchens, we pick up books, we administer the sacrament of fiction -- our every story a sigh of the human heart and a victory of hope over experience.