'Too Much Happiness' by Alice Munro  Too Much Happiness   Alice
Munro  Alfred A. Knopf: 320 pp., $25.95  "No way this could be
seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between
the eyes, a sudden calamity," muses the narrator of "Fiction,"
one of the 10 masterly stories that make up Alice Munro's latest
collection, "Too Much Happiness." "The stroke of fate that
leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes
into blind stones." It sounds as if she were talking about
violence. In fact, she is talking about someone falling in love.
But love also can be a type of calamity, and shares with
violence a deep unpredictability, a disturbing power to alter
radically the course of one's life.  The power of random events
lies at the heart of "Too Much Happiness." Nearly every story
here hinges on some calamity, some unanticipated and mostly
arbitrary event. Such things appear, before they happen, neither
probable nor possible, though afterward they may well come to
seem inevitable. These are