BOOK REVIEW

By Margot Griffiths

On July 16. 2003, Carol Shields died at the age of 68. Not one for self-pity, she felt “lucky” she outran cancer long enough to finish her last novel, Unless.

Shields’ brilliance lay in her deft dealings with things domestic. Like Jane Austen, her legacy is the fine touch, the immediacy, she brought to daily lives, in particular the lives of women. She has been described as a “miniaturist,” a term she may not have appreciated, but one that defines her ability to create characters to which the reader can relate. The Stone Diaries (1995) won Shields the Pulitzer Prize.

Unless chronicles the grief of Reta Winters, a middle-aged writer, whose 19-year-old daughter, Norah, has suddenly left their cozy family to sit on the streets of Toronto, begging, wearing a sign that says “goodness.” What has brought on this bizarre behavior, Reta asks? She responds to this question with a strongly feminist answer. Norah has done it, she asserts, because women are robbed of voice, or influence. Norah has chosen such a life, because sitting silently through her days, proclaiming goodness is the only thing left to her that requires no voice, no power. It also requires no resistance.

As the novel proceeds, one may ask, why doesn’t Reta do something to help her daughter? Why does she mimic the very passivity that has its stranglehold on her daughter? Passivity is dangerous, it can provoke violence. Perhaps Shields, in dealing with her own helplessness in the face of creeping death, knows too well that something cannot be undone, cannot be stopped. What Reta does do is carry on, making a home for her other two daughters, and her physician husband ­ so typical of Shield’s gentle irony. Reta also carries on with her successful career as a writer of lightweight fiction. Yet as the puzzle of her daughter life overtakes her, Reta will no longer hide her political views behind the “lace of literary conventions.” Her book takes on an altogether different tone (one that her male editor wants stopped!) as she protests the invisibility of women, particularly in the world of culture.

Like her character ­ and at heart, what writer isn’t ­ Shields has written an unapologetic feminist manifesto. And yet she does so with compassion, humor and an exploration of happenstance, in which, Shields explains her title. If the mundane narratives of life are to become meaningful, they require “odd pieces of language to link them together.” Language like, however, if, despite, also, therefore, unless. There is a foreboding, a sense of calamity to the word Unless.

This is understandably the most introspective of Shields’ brilliant novels, each one decorated with awards. Unless is a finely crafted enigma that concludes with surprising hope and wisdom. And of course, there is Shields’ stunning language quality her signature simplicity and elegance.

Though not all will relate to Shields’ final battle of feminist anger ­ a book, some complain, in search of a plot ­ all can agree that on July 16, the world was robbed of one of its great literary lights.

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