Unless: A Novel (P.S.)

I enjoyed this book. Her writing is some of the best I have found.i will read more of her work

"A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mainly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet." In this, the opening of the final chapter of her final book, Carol Shields explains the structure of her novel, and the oblique nature of its chapter headings: once, wherein, nevertheless, so... . She explains it too well, actually, for coherent narrative is the one thing that her book lacks, at least until the very end. It is a brilliantly-written collection of fragments: family memories, observations on the art of writing, unsent letters to various male recipients chiding them for their chauvinism, and thoughts about a new novel that the protagonist is writing. But not really a story.Reta Winters, mid-forties, living some miles from Toronto, mother of three teenage daughters, and blessed with a loving partner, has achieved some renown as the translator of the French poet and Holocaust survivor Danielle Westerman. Striking out on her own, she has published a light romance entitled "My Thyme is Up," and her publishers have contracted a sequel, "Thyme in Bloom." But she is mired in bewilderment and grief. Her eldest daughter, Norah, has dropped out of college, left her boyfriend, and spends her days on a street corner in Toronto with a begging bowl and a hand-lettered sign saying GOODNESS. She will not respond to her siblings or parents, who are at a loss to understand the cause of her virtual self-immolation. Reta, a quiet but determined feminist, believes it is a reaction to the condition of being deprived of her voice as a woman, hence those unsent letters. But she does not know, and neither her attempts to analyze the problem, or to channel it into her fiction, or to carry on as normally as possible seem to bring any clarity. The ending, when it comes, seems almost simplistic by comparison with the bafflement that had reigned heretofore.I have discovered that it makes a difference when one reads a particular book and what one has read before it. For example, I have just read  THE NOBODIES ALBUM  by Carolyn Parkhurst, another book in which a professional writer uses her fiction to help her come to grips with problems in her own family. Carol Shields is by far the better writer (I loved  THE STONE DIARIES ), and she recognizes the dangers of this approach. As Reta says, "I too am aware of being in incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer who is writing." But to state the dangers is not necessarily to avoid them, especially since "Thyme in Bloom" seems altogether too slight an undertaking to reflect either Reta's intelligence or her emotional needs. Between the two books, I also read  TINKERS  by Paul Harding, another superb writer who strings together brilliant observations on the most slender connecting story. Two books of this kind in a row are one too many. The memoirs of a fictional character do not automatically become a novel just because the writer is not the author. A collection of essays, plot-ideas, and letters do not coalesce into novel form just because a fictional event has caused their fragmentation in the first place. Individual sections of this book are magnificent, but they need more than prepositions to hold them together; they demand conjunctions.

Reta Winters, a writer, has three delightful daughters, a faithful husband who is a family doctor, and a seven-year-old golden retriever named Pet. They live in a small town in Ontario in a 100-year-old farmhouse with an apple orchard, raspberry patch, and separate rooms for each of the three girls. Theirs is an affluent, unremarkable, middle class life, until the oldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Norah, goes missing and is found, uncommunicative, panhandling on a street corner in Toronto with a sign that reads "goodness." Norah has abruptly and inexplicably withdrawn from the world refusing to talk to her parents, sisters or boyfriend.Written in the first person narrative, Reta escorts the reader through a mother's daily routines under the dark cloud of a disconnected daughter. Each of her women friends and acquaintances express support and their unique insight for hopeful resolution. There is little Reta can do though. Once a week she drives to Toronto with food and clothes for a daughter that refuses to acknowledge her presence, so Reta spies on her from nearby stores. At home, she carefully sweeps the cellar stairs, as if getting the dirt out of the corners will somehow enlighten the shadow that has befallen her offspring. The timeless anguish of motherhood is palpable.Shortly before Norah disappears, she laments to her mother over the immensity of the world, about her struggle to get past the little things. She says "I'm trying to find where I fit in."Given Reta's feminist perception of the world, she believes that her daughter's malignancy is founded in the exclusion and powerlessness of women, that despite "having come so far," they've been snookered into the side pocket. Through Reta and her mentor Danielle Westerman, an aged literary feminist, Shield splatters her story with the female grievance, about the male power play and the non-recognition of women etc. It's not a hard sell though. Reta drafts letters criticizing male writers for excluding females from their lists of achievers, yet she never mails them. And in her ending, Shield wags her finger at the shrillness of Reta's complaint.If you are a reader accustomed to being hooked in the first paragraph and reeled in by the end of chapter one, a reader who believes that a novel is first and foremost story and that style is irrelevant, you might be disappointed with Unless. Only Shield's strong prose and your faith that she'll get to some point will carry you to chapter two. This novel was not written to entertain. Indeed, Danielle Westerman chides Reta "for the unworthiness of novel writing." Reta is inclined to agree: "...what really is the point of novel writing when the unjust world howls and writhes...UNLESS they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they're just so much narrative crumble" (emphasis is mine).Unless is not narrative crumble. It is the last word of an accomplished author with five children and terminal cancer. Unless did more than take me inside the mind of a mother in grief. It made me wonder whether we are so trapped by our history that, in the end, we are uncertain who we are and what we have done.

Another fabulous book by Carol Shields...

Book as described. Arrived in expected time, thanks

Carole writes very well using language that provides clarity and captivates interest but is beyond the vocabulary of the majority of people, possibly not her particulr set of readers, but most. I kept thinking that the plot would begin to unravel and take off on a more vertical plane but that never seemed to happen. The story evolves slowly and eventually resolves itself but only after 320 pages of much of the same. What kept me going was the way she puts words together. She paints a very pretty but dreary picture with copious quantities of fine detail and tangents of loquaciousness. Interesting but in a tedious way.

It is a very long winded story about nothing much. I did finish it but only just. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

When I saw the trailer for Alan Gilsenan’s adaptation of this novel, I was curious to discover why this young woman had ended up on the streets and thought I would read the book to prepare myself for the film. For a whole week I have been struggling to understand what I just read. Nikki Baughan’s review of the film on screendaily.com states: "the film’s central conceit [is] that we should all take time to acknowledge, and, appreciate, the individual moments that make up a narrative, and a life." This helped me get a better grasp on the point Carol Shields was perhaps trying to get across with this novel. The only way I can make sense of the narrator spending only a quarter of the book on her daughter and her mysterious situation, filling up the rest of the pages with pointless descriptions and unrelated self-absorbed reflections about feminism and her writing (serving us an entire chapter on her characters’ sex life), is that Reta Winters is meant as a blatant example of what she dislikes so much in a male-dominated society. Reta Winters is so annoyed at men imposing their own narratives and looking down on women's, yet she is imposing her views on Norah's motivation and does it repeatedly throughout the book with other individuals, in particular when her family visits the Anglican-run shelter where Norah sleeps. Moved by the volunteers' love and care, she wonders what their motivation is. Looking condescendingly at these "litany singers" she declares that they might answer it is about Christ’s love, but it is more likely a "sense of social responsibility" in these "ecumenical times." Did she ask them what their motivation was? No, she assumed she knew, perhaps better than they did. That's when I really began to wonder if I was expected to empathize with the narrator or believe she was a jerk. In the end, Norah Winters' reasons for becoming catatonic are entirely different from her mother's interpretation; the reasons were out there and even made public in the media; the Winters would have known had they paid attention to this. If all this was Shields' point, I respect it, but she makes this book a total chore to get through. I believe most readers will feel constantly frustrated by the narrator's endless rambling while they are dying to know what Norah's story is all about, crying: "Shut up and give me the spoiler!" If you find yourself in this unpleasant position as you are reading the book, head straight for the last chapters and you will have your answer.