One imagines that Alice Munro, who last week won the Nobel Prize for Literature, views the whole circus with the detachment that is her trademark.

Almost certainly she will find the money - eight million Swedish krona (£775,000) - absurd.

We have the expression "a shedload" to describe such amounts. If this was a Munro story, she would have the writer - let's call her Ivy - unable to comprehend the reality and keeping the money in her shed. "One day, a plume of smoke could be seen rising through the trees by the lake. Ivy waved to Jim in the drugstore the following morning. It would be a good spring."

There is a spareness to her writing, almost a bleakness, that reflects the landscapes in which some of her stories are set - those dark forests of spruce, frozen lakes, isolated cabins, snow.

Perhaps the loneliness of some of the settings is like that of the characters themselves. Each seems to feed into the other.

All writers are observers, of course, but Munro seems to have refined the art to an extraordinary degree. Do people who meet her feel nervous, lest she will sense their pain and loneliness - or their pretension - and later use it, loosely disguised, in one of her stories?

Like figures in a Hopper painting, she captures small-town despair too. When you sit by yourself in a cafe and watch someone sitting alone, perhaps turning a teaspoon over and over, it is to be in an Alice Munro story. Her world is the heartbreak of what never was, what could have been. Children trying to understand adult behaviour. The flicker between two happily married people who recognise it in the other. The universal sadness of time passing.

Much has been made of her similarity to Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, but in terms of her seeing the universal in the small and the local, another writer comes to mind - the Lakeland poet Norman Nicholson who spent his whole life in his own "Ontario" of Millom, Cumbria.

He observed that people who stayed, who didn't move to the metropolis "may be all the more aware of that which is enduring in life and society".

There is something of that in Munro too. Her stories are always far more than their locations. They have a meaning that rises slowly, like smoke from a fire - often unsaid but implied, and all the more powerful for it.