Ms. Munro was born, lives in, and largely writes about the same part of the world— rural southwestern Canada. This is also the setting of the novel, in Tuppertown, "an old town on Lake Huron, an old grain port." The town is bordered by good farming land, and the lake—Lake Huron— provides a kind of ritualistic wildness that is reflected in the people, though only in subtly defined ways. While people tend to go about their business and greet one another in a ritualistic manner, there is the sly hint of discomfiture running through the veins of the story that belies complacency.

The narrator and her father walk to the lake together quite often, but the trip they take on the day in which the story takes place is beyond the bounds of the quotidian; her father takes her and her brother to the...