SOURCE: "In Ontario," in London Review of Books, February 7, 1991, pp. 22-3.

Shields is a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist, poet, and critic who has lived in and written about Canada. In the following review, she favorably reviews Friend of My Youth, calling it a book on which every page contains "particular satisfactions of prose that is supple, tart and spare."

The Canadian writer Alice Munro once likened a good short story to a commodious house whose every room possesses an exterior door. So accommodating a house, she wrote, is capable of admitting visitors through any number of openings, just as a story can be entered by way of its separate sections or paragraphs or even its individual sentences or words. The rewards for the reader, she suggests, have to do with language rather than with the sequence of narrative, the rhythm and surprise of linguistic persuasion overriding the fortunes of...