The announcement that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called “our Chekhov.” All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are “our Chekhov.” But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov—which is to say, the English language’s Chekhov. (In Munro’s great story, “The Beggar Maid,” an ambitious man sees that a friend of the woman he is courting “mispronounced Metternich,” and says indignantly to her: “How can you be friends with people like that?” I’m put in mind of Chekhov’s story “The Russian Master,” which has a character who repeatedly torments a young teacher by asking him why he has “never read Lessing.”)

Yet many of Munro’s readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee seemed to like; I had decided that she would join the list of noble non-Nobelists, a distinguished category that includes Tolstoy, Nabokov, Borges, Hrabal, Sebald, Bernhard, Ingmar Bergman—and Chekhov, as it happens.

We were wrong, and for once it was wonderful to be wrong. Greatly enjoying being wrong, I spent an hour yesterday rereading one of Munro’s finest stories, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which appeared in this magazine. It tells the story of Grant and Fiona, who have been married for many years. Grant has been a professor, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature, Fiona a hospital administrator. In their old age, Fiona begins to develop signs of serious dementia, and Grant has her placed in a local nursing home, Meadowlake. The marriage has been a happy one, or so Grant feels, despite the fact that he has been a considerable philanderer: “He had never stopped making love to Fiona in spite of disturbing demands elsewhere. He had not stayed away from her for a single night.” And just as he has been, in his way, devoted to his wife, so Fiona never strayed from him. It was never, despite Grant’s many infidelities, an open marriage. She put up with his adventures.

On the morning of his first visit to the nursing home, after a month’s separation from Fiona, Grant is “full of a solemn tingling, as in the old days on the morning of his first planned meeting with a new woman.” Fiona has not quite forgotten Grant (this is his great anxiety), but she has found a new friend in the nursing home, a man of about Grant’s age, named Aubrey, wonderfully described as having “something of the beauty of a powerful, discouraged, elderly horse. But where Fiona was concerned, he was not discouraged.” Grant is naturally jealous, but his love for Fiona is protective, and over the next weeks he begins to adapt to the new happiness that Fiona has clearly found with Aubrey: “He didn’t see much point in mentioning their marriage, now.” When Aubrey—who was only a temporary resident—leaves the nursing home to return to life with his younger wife, Fiona is distraught, and Grant decides that he will ask Marian, Aubrey’s wife, if she might occasionally let Aubrey visit Fiona. Marian refuses: she doesn’t want to upset her bewildered husband. He belongs at home, she says, with her. She says that it was probably a mistake to have put him in the nursing home, even briefly. Grant returns home empty-handed, but he finds a phone message from Marian: Would he like to go with her to “a dance in town at the Legion supposed to be for singles on Saturday night…. I realize you’re not a single and I don’t mean it that way. I’m not either, but it doesn’t hurt to get out once in a while.” The old philanderer is interested—partly because a seducer has never retired from the game, but largely because he thinks that this may be the best way to get Marian to let Aubrey visit Fiona in the nursing home. Perhaps Marian will be inclined, once the affair is properly blossoming, to send her husband back there for good?

The story is beautiful in the irony of its symmetries—the philanderer who unexpectedly loses his loyal wife to the love of another man, and then returns to his old erotic ways in order to secure his wife’s own continuing infidelity. But two additional elements, both characteristic of Munro’s careful art, make it a great story. First, there is Munro’s astounding lack of sentimentality—the clear-eyed, utterly unillusioned, bleakly subtle description of the nursing home, its inmates, and its staff. Grant, for instance, becomes reliant on one of the nurses, who has her own problems—an absent husband, four children, one of whom is asthmatic. “To her, Grant and Fiona and Aubrey too must seem lucky. They had got through life without too much going wrong. What they had to suffer now that they were old hardly counted.” The second very Munro-ish element is the formal freedom of the story, which compacts a lot of life into a short space, and moves backwards and forwards over a great deal of terrain. Strikingly, the story begins with two paragraphs, subsequently abandoned, about Fiona and Grant as young people, before they were even married, and then vaults silently over fifty years to begin the narrative of Fiona’s elderly mental decline. These two first paragraphs are beautifully full of energy and joy and hope; they capture with extraordinary economy the happiness of youth, a happiness largely absent from the rest of the story. This is how “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” begins: