Alice Munro was the English language’s Chekhov

“Promise me you’ll boil the water you drink. And you won’t marry a farmer,” says a character in “The Love of a Good Woman”. Instantly, the reader is in Alice Munro territory: spinsters with lingering illnesses and stifled passions, jealous married women scrubbing floors, inky veins protruding from their legs. Light falls constantly on the domestic: a gas stove in the kitchen fed with quarters, a dining-room table with a lace cloth on it, a ceramic swan reflected in an octagonal mirror. But there is always something savage lurking beneath the veneer of gentility. Certain themes recur—of drowning, regret, longing and the cruelty of lovers.