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A review by bjr2022
Unless by Carol Shields
4.0
It is said that most writers have only one story to tell and, if they write more than one book, they essentially find lots of different ways of telling or exploring that story. After reading, in fairly quick succession, three of Carol Shields's books (The Stone Diaries, The Box Garden, and this book), I wonder if her story is about a search for genuine internal kindness and compassion—as opposed to the stuff we feign or aspire to, knowing that we secretly have the opposite feelings.
But to reduce Shields's work to that one theme seems unfair. She writes with such muscle, weaving a concern for philosophical and sociological issues into her stories.
In Unless, a writer named Reta Winters grapples with a woman's place in literature and in life as she agonizes over her eldest daughter's retreat from family and participation in life by becoming a mute beggar wearing a cardboard sign on her chest, "a single word printed in black marker—GOODNESS," as she sits on a street corner in Toronto.
How does Shields manage coherence? Somehow she intertwines palpable warmth in her descriptions of family, marriage, and home; along with long passages about women's invisibility or miniaturization in literature; along with her protagonist Reta Winters's notes about the light fiction she is writing (talk about images within images: writer Carol Shields writes a writer who is writing a writer who is writing!); along with a mother's understanding of her daughter's pain and her own desperation for the well-being of all three of her children. Shields pulls off what could, in less muscular hands, become a tedious weave. Not only was I intrigued as a reader, but as a writer I was inspired.
But to reduce Shields's work to that one theme seems unfair. She writes with such muscle, weaving a concern for philosophical and sociological issues into her stories.
In Unless, a writer named Reta Winters grapples with a woman's place in literature and in life as she agonizes over her eldest daughter's retreat from family and participation in life by becoming a mute beggar wearing a cardboard sign on her chest, "a single word printed in black marker—GOODNESS," as she sits on a street corner in Toronto.
How does Shields manage coherence? Somehow she intertwines palpable warmth in her descriptions of family, marriage, and home; along with long passages about women's invisibility or miniaturization in literature; along with her protagonist Reta Winters's notes about the light fiction she is writing (talk about images within images: writer Carol Shields writes a writer who is writing a writer who is writing!); along with a mother's understanding of her daughter's pain and her own desperation for the well-being of all three of her children. Shields pulls off what could, in less muscular hands, become a tedious weave. Not only was I intrigued as a reader, but as a writer I was inspired.