Collected Stories
Carol Shields, 2004
HarperCollins
693 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060762049
Summary
With the profound maturity and exquisite eye for detail that never failed to capture readers of her prize-winning novels, Carol Shields dazzles with these remarkable stories. Generous, delightful, and acutely observed, this essential collection illuminates the miracles that grace our lives; it will continue to enchant for years to come. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 2, 1935
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Death—July 16, 2003
• Where—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A., Hanover College; M.A., Ottawa University
• Awards—Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction for Larry’s Party,
1998; Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries, 1995; National
Book Critics Circle Award for The Stone Diaries, 1994
Carol Shields's characters are often on the road less traveled, and the trip is never boring. She has written about a folklorist, a poet, a maze designer, a translator, even other writers—appropriate professions in novels in which characters struggle to find their own paths in life.
Shields often focused on female characters, most notably in The Stone Diaries, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel documenting the birth, death, and everything in between of Daisy Goodwill. Goodwill's story is told over a century, in various voices, featuring Shields's wry humor and her ability to convey what she has called "the arc of human life."
But don't pigeonhole Shields as a "women's writer." "I have directed a fair amount of energy and rather a lot of rage into that particular corner [of the] problem of men and women, particularly men and women who write and how women's novels are perceived differently from men's," Shields said in a 2001 interview. In 1997's Larry's Party, she swapped genders, writing from the perspective of a male floral designer who discovers a passion for mazes.
Unafraid to experiment with genres, Shields wrote an epistolary novel (A Celibate Season, coauthored with Blanche Howard), a sort of "literary mystery" about the posthumous discovery of a murdered poet's genius (Swann), and short stories (collected in Dressing for the Carnival and other titles). Though she often covered serious topics, she rarely did so without humor. Her novel of mid-life romance, Republic of Love, was called by the New York Times a "touching, elegantly funny, luscious work of fiction," an assessment that could be applied to the bulk of her work.
Shields changed her viewpoint yet again for Unless, but the circumstance was a tragic one. The book, which resurrects the main character from Dressing Up for the Carnival's "A Scarf," was written during the author's battle with breast cancer. "I never want to sound at all mystical about writing,'' she said in a 2002 interview, ''but this book—it just came out." Though not touching on her own illness, Shields did what she had always done—took her own questions and lessons, then used them to produce a story that speaks its own truth.
Shields passed away on July 16, 2003; she was 68.
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is how she responded:
• When I was home sick as a child I used to take several volumes of the Encyclopedia to bed with me. We had a World Book Encyclopedia, which had quite a few pictures in color. I read the volumes randomly, browsing my way through them. I loved the hugeness of the world they confirmed for me, and the notion that that vastness could be organized and identified. You might think I would be humbled by the fact that people—individual intelligences—could become familiar with arcane material, but, in fact, I was deeply encouraged.
Here is Shields on were her favorite books (a fascinating list):
• Emma by Jane Austen. This book was written at the height of Austen's powers, when she felt secure in her footing.
• The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul. The subject is so complex and the approach so original, that I didn't think he'd make it to the end, but he did.
• The Rabbit novels by John Updike. You might think of this as the four books it is, or you might see it as one long novel of the life of an American male in the middle of the 20th century. It is a great accomplishment, this emotional documentation of a human life and the other lives that accompany him.
• Independent People by Halldor Laxness, the Icelandic Nobel Prize winner. This novel has an epic range, looking at the world sometimes through a giant telescope, then concentrating with a magnifying lens on the rambling thoughts of one particular child.
• I love all the books by Alice Munro, who has given the world new ways of looking at the lives of women. She has, in fact, reinvented the shape of the short story.
• Possession by A. S. Byatt captures what many novels leave out: the life of the mind and the excitement of intellectual reflection.
• Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. This book, published in the last year, is about family, about the delicacy and strength that weaves the family into a web.
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond made me believe (for about ten minutes) that I understood how the world was made. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Taken together, Shields's stories risk seeming like curiously weightless exercises—lightly parodic postmodern turns. Yet this eclectic bundle of fragments also serves to highlight her novelistic gift and heft. When Shields stitches together such vivid patchworks of lives in her longer fiction, she manages to convey the inadequacy, and also the urgent necessity, of words to give us a grip on our discontinuous selves—and a glimpse into the ultimately unknowable worlds of others. Shields's novels do tend to end happily. But they are also haunting because she has made us aware that ''the arabesque of the unfolded self'' (a very Shieldsian phrase from ''Absence'') is always a dance over an abyss.g
Ann Hulbert - New York Times Book Review
Shields, who died in 2003, was best known for her novels (The Stone Diaries; Unless), though she published three collections of stories over as many decades, here elegantly gathered and introduced by fellow Canadian and friend Margaret Atwood. Appearing first is her last unpublished tale, "Segue," about an aging couple in failing health-he a famous novelist, she a writer of sonnets-who grow apart as they take "responsibility for [their] own dying bodies." The story serves as a poignant tribute. Overall, Shields's touch is gorgeously light, her tales capturing brief, evanescent moments in the busy lives of couples, mothers and lonely wives. If a few entries seem too brief or lack development, "Hazel" demonstrates all the elements of Shields's mastery: an ordinary widow, perhaps too polite for her own good, finds a satisfying job as an itinerant kitchen demonstrator and discovers that her timidity and self-effacement can actually be turned to her advantage. From the same collection, the story "Collision" draws on Shields's extended travels and is set in a "small ellipsoid state in eastern Europe," where two lonely people of exotically different background and language collide on a rainy night; the story pursues a separate "biography" of each of the lovers with "every narrative scrap... equally honored." In "Edith-Esther," a story from Shields's last collection, the author prophetically portrays the eponymous protagonist, an 80-year-old novelist, as a "rare bird," pestered by her biographer for "some spiritual breeze" he can put into his book about her. She resists, but the biographer reworks her life the way he wants and in the end, to her dismay, refashions her work as uplifting—the last thing she intended it to be. Uplifting or not, this is a volume full of grace and wisdom.
Publishers Weekly
This author received wide notice during her lifetime, through both healthy sales and critical recognition, the latter including the Pulitzer Prize (for The Stone Diaries). This posthumous publication of her complete short fiction will be welcomed by her many readers and will provide a good introduction for those not familiar with her work. The collection opens with "Segue," the only story not published previously, in which a thoughtful woman maintains balance in the post-9/11 world by composing a sonnet every two weeks, one line per day. Writing's solaces and frustrations appear often: in the amusing "Absence," a sticky keyboard forces a writer to produce a complete piece without the letter i; in "A Scarf," a successful author learns an ironic lesson about being true to one's inner self. Many stories examine the quirks of everyday life, where mystery may lie just behind the ordinary ("Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass," "Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls"). Others explore the seemingly minor domestic crises that can discombobulate relationships ("Accident," "Dressing Down," "Hinterland"). All depict distinctive moments in a variety of settings, with moods ranging from nostalgic to farcical. A moving introduction by Margaret Atwood honors Shields's life and writing. Recommended for most collections.—Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA
Library Journal
The collected contents of the late (1935-2003) Canadian author's three published story volumes. Various Miracles (1985) showcases Shields's affectionate scrutiny of marital and familial experience, in deft portrayals of a woman's life understood by assembling random "Scenes," a violinist who escapes through music her family's claustrophobic embrace ("A Wood"), a lengthy friendship traced through exchanged Christmas card messages ("Others") and a house-hunting couple's willed flight from the memory of a child's death ("Fragility"). The Orange Fish (1989) focuses mostly on women's imaginative responses to quotidian dilemmas, notably in the tale of a middle-aged couple's Parisian second honeymoon ("Hinterland"), which brings them separate visions of their individual and shared vulnerability and mortality. Shields's fondness for fabulism ("The Harp") and explorations of writers' lives dominates Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000), distinguished chiefly by revelations of how significant meanings inhere in mundane things (the title piece, "Soup du Jour"), and by the comic tale of a resolute nudist ("Dressing Down"): a rich story displaying the rangy inventiveness more prominent in her popular novels (the 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning Stone Diaries, etc.). Shields the storyteller is a somewhat lesser writer, but she's always worth reading.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Carol Shields spoke of becoming a writer because there weren’t enough books that examined women’s friendships and women’s inner lives — or, as she put it, “the kind of book I wanted to read but couldn’t find.” In what ways does Shields’s fiction bring the lives of women to the surface, or into our understanding? What sorts of female experiences does she illuminate?
2. In her novels and stories, Shields often experiments with using different voices. The Stone Diaries shifts between first-, second-, and third-person narrative; one section of Larry’s Party is recorded almost entirely in dialogue; Happenstance is a novel in two parts, one narrated by the husband, one by the wife; the stories in Various Miracles come from a wide variety of narrative standpoints. Discuss point-of-view in Shields’s works, and the importance of telling one’s own stories — as characters or in real life. Also, what is the role of the writer in telling other people’s stories for them?
3. Though she’s lauded as a writer who brought the lives of ordinary people to the page and made them extraordinary, Carol Shields took some exception to the idea in one interview: “I have never known what ‘ordinary’ people means! I don’t think I quite believe in the concept.... There’s no one who isn’t complicated, who doesn’t have areas of cowardice or courage, who isn’t incapable of some things and capable of great acts. I think everyone has that capability. Either we’re all ordinary or else none of us is ordinary.” Discuss the role of ordinary life in Shields’s fiction. How do her above views come across in her writing? Is there a respect for the everyday that you don’t see in works by other writers?
4. Shields once commented that she’d often set up the structure of a novel, determining such elements as how many chapters there would be, and how long they’d be, before she even set out to write. “I need that kind of structure,” she explained. “[S]ometimes I change it. But mostly I don’t.... I love structures, and I love making new structures for novels.” Discuss the overall structures of different novels and how they relate to the content. For example, does Larry Weller’s love of garden mazes say anything about the twenty years of his life covered by Larry’s Party? What meaning can be found in the one-word chapter titles of Unless? How does Shields use, or even undermine, the biography format in The Stone Diaries?
5. “I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people,” Shields once said. “That's why I love biography and the idea of the human life told or shown. Of course, this is why I love novels, too. In novels, you get to hear how people are thinking. That’s why I read fiction.” How does Shields expose and often celebrate the inner lives of her characters? Can you find examples of characters who aren’t really known to those around them? How do their relationships suffer, or thrive, or even just survive, in the face of such distance?
6. How does what you know about Carol Shields as a person affect your reading of her books? Are you able to separate the author from her work? Do you feel the need to? What parallels can you draw between her approach to life and those of her characters? For instance, most of her main characters are women at mid-life, and many of her characters are writers or work in other areas of book publishing (translators, editors, etc.).
7. In interviews about Larry’s Party, Carol Shields commented more than once that men were “the ultimate mystery” to her. Discuss the male characters in Shields’s fiction — both those in prominent roles, like Larry Weller in Larry’s Party or Tom Avery in The Republic of Love, and the many husbands and lovers that seem to populate the sidelines of other stories and novels. How successfully does Shields portray the world of men in her work? Are there common characteristics you can trace between books? Are some of her male characters defined by the women they love? Or is it more often the other way around?
8. Many of Carol Shields’s works explore the ways individuals interact with their communities. Some characters are defined by their loneliness, while others struggle with their responsibilities to the people around them, whether it’s their family or a larger group. Discuss the roles of family and community in Shields’s fiction.
9. Carol Shields has always been well-known for her love of language, and its slipperiness. In what ways does her writing call attention to itself as writing? Are there particular stories or novels that you find playful? Or linguistically complex?
10. Author and literary journalist James Atlas, who edited the series for which Shields wrote her Austen biography, once said about Carol Shields, “she is our Jane Austen.” Compare Shields’s fiction to that of Austen — are there common themes or techniques? What other major authors would you compare Shields to, and why? Where does her work fit into our literary canon?
(Questions found on Barnes & Noble site.)
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