Excerpt from Munro’s story ‘Royal Beatings’ shows spare yet descriptive style

Many of Alice Munro’s stories feature characters who live in communities that bear a distinct resemblance to Wingham in southwestern Ontario, where she grew up. This excerpt is from her short story “Royal Beatings” (taken from the collection “My Best Stories,” Penguin, 2006) and is an example of her spare, yet descriptive style:

They lived in a poor part of town. There was Hanratty and West Hanratty, with the river flowing between them. This was West Hanratty. In Hanratty the social structure ran from doctors and dentists and lawyers down to foundry workers and factory workers and draymen; in West Hanratty it ran from factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves. Rose thought of her own family as straddling the river, belonging nowhere, but that was not true. West Hanratty was where the store was and they were, on the straggling tail end of the main street. Across the road from them was a blacksmith shop, boarded up about the time the war started, and a house that had been another store at one time. The Salada Tea sign had never been taken out of the front window; it remained as a proud and interesting decoration though there was no Salada Tea for sale inside.