Alice Munro's hired girls like to read too.In "Sunday Afternoon", Alva asks Mr. Gannett if she could borrow "King Lear" and, also, Stendhal's The Red and the Black. Mr. Gannett agrees to share his books with Alva, just as Mr. Montjoy gifts the young Alice with his copy of Seven Gothic Tales at the end of
"Since writing Love Medicine, I have understood that I am writing one long book in which the main chapters are also books titled Tracks, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and The Painted Drum. The characters appear and disappear in my
As with Tracks, the primary voices in Four Souls are Fleur's and Nanapush's. So, although it was published more than ten years later, I opted to read Four Souls next, to keep these characters fresher in mind and heart, hoping for a deeper understanding. Two other women play significant roles
Although some of the characters in the Margaret Millar mysteries I have read answer their own phones, many answer other people's phones instead: the telephones of older or more privileged relatives or those of their bosses. There's even a switchboard operator in the mix, along with a woman better known
Because so many of Margaret Millar's novels consider married couples - often at the point in which the relationship is strained, if not fractured - one wonders about her relationship with Ken Millar (better known as Ross MacDonald, who also wrote mysteries). Did they squabble like Esther and Ron do
