Too Much Happiness

In Dimensions, the collection's opening story, Doree rides three buses every week to visit her husband Lloyd in the psychiatric facility where he is held for killing their three children, and Munro spends the story less on the crime itself than on the strange, unwanted intimacy Doree still feels toward the man who destroyed her family, an intimacy she can't fully explain even to herself. Free Radicals pushes the collection's violence into a single afternoon: an elderly widow, alone in her house, talks her way past a man who has just killed his own family, matching his horror with an invented murder confession of her own to keep him from adding her to the count.

Too Much Happiness, the sixty-page title novella that closes the book, dramatizes the real life of Sofya Kovalevskaya, the first woman in modern Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics, tracking her professional exile from country to country in search of a professorship no institution would grant a woman outright, her unstable marriage to the political theorist Maxim Kovalevsky, and her death from pneumonia on a lecture trip in 1891, redirecting Munro's usual scope, contemporary and rural Ontario, into biography and nineteenth-century Europe without losing the collection's central interest in how much a woman is allowed to want out of her own life.

The bus rides themselves, three transfers each way to a facility Doree can barely afford to reach, become their own kind of penance, and Munro lets a near-fatal highway accident on one such trip briefly interrupt even that ritual, forcing Doree to notice how entirely her life has narrowed down to this one, unresolved obligation.

Kovalevskaya studies privately under Karl Weierstrass because German universities won't admit women to lectures, and enters a marriage of convenience with a paleontologist largely to secure the legal freedom to travel and study at all, a bureaucratic workaround Munro treats with the same clear-eyed attention she gives the collection's domestic violence, another system built to make a woman's ambition cost more than a man's ever would.