Alice Munro … writes stories you have to call "well-made."… They are journeymen's work. But they are no more than that, and by now … we ought to demand that a volume of stories delivers the thrilling economy, the poetry which makes the form so valuable.

Alice Munro's subject matter is ordinariness—disappointment, the passage of time—but she doesn't bring to her stories what, say, John Updike or Tillie Olsen do: extraordinary language, a mind in love with the everyday but able to exalt it so that we feel the magic in what is usual. Most of the stories [in "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You"] concern the past, hidden from others but told to us … and the stories do seem formulaic.

The book is filled with lots of information on who did what to whom, and when, and where, but there is little emotional tension arising from...