Alice Munro's New Yorker Piece, "Deep-Holes"

I just read Alice Munro’s fiction piece in the New Yorker, “Deep-Holes.” As a mother of two girls, I found it to be a mysterious and riveting story. It answers the classic parental question/nightmare: what happens when your child does not turn out to be what you might expect? Kent, the son, has a terrible accident as a young boy and then in adulthood, cuts himself off from his family and lives on the urban fringes of society. It seems like a far fetched story at first--that Kent would just drop off the face of the earth after 6 months in college and not seek contact with his family but once after that--but at the same time, it is not so far fetched for parents to lose track of their sons and daughters like this.

The New Yorker has been doing a lot of great fiction lately. Usually I have not been that receptive to their fiction or their poetry, but I enjoyed their summer fiction issue and read it cover to cover. The Annie Proulx story “Tits Up in a Ditch” was especially memorable. The Faith and Doubt vignettes from several fiction writers also worked together very well, culminating in the article by James Wood on Hellmouth.