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'Unless' by Carol Shields

Carol Shields explores the elements of goodness

Sunday, May 12, 2002

By By Sherri Hallgren, was director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference

	Unless By Carol Shields 4th Estate (HarperCollins) $24.95

To make conversation, Reta Winters has asked him once and for all to explain the theory of relativity. To do so, he places his napkin loosely over his cup of coffee, then puts a cherry on the top, tipping the cup to make the cherry careen around the slightly bowled cloth.

But Reta is so distracted by the possibility of his spilling coffee on the white linen and the exorbitant price she paid for the cherries, that she can’t quite listen.

This is Reta in a nutshell: simultaneously engaged with the beauty of physics and the problem of laundry. She is a type of character Shields creates so well: an extraordinary ordinary person -- rather like us, only much more interesting.

Until recently, 44-year-old Reta has had a life characterized by what she calls the “useful monotony of happiness,” a long good marriage to a family doctor (although since they are children of their generation, they never legally married) in a rambling old farmhouse an hour outside Toronto. She also has had a moderately successful career as a writer and translator and boasts three lovely daughters.

However, she has just learned that “happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head.” Reta has discovered that her oldest daughter, Norah, has dropped out of college and is sitting on the sidewalk outside a Toronto subway station wearing a sign that reads “Goodness.” She rarely looks up; she never speaks. Passers-by sometimes give her money.

Reta and her husband have consulted Norah’s boyfriend, her academic adviser, and several psychologists, trying to understand what could have happened and what to do, and all have advised them to give Norah her space, assuring them she will eventually come home.

But it’s autumn when the novel opens, and in Canada, it’s getting cold.

This is the novel’s central issue, and Reta’s ongoing agony over Norah constitutes what there is of its plot. Shields is interested in the question of how a person goes on from day to day after the world has broken suddenly into a “before” and an “after.”

This, then, is the story of Reta’s life for half a year, her thoughts reported in her voice, which is by turns grave, sly, but always intelligent. Claiming that the examined life “has had altogether too much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air,” Reta goes on.

She sees friends, and she works on the comic novel she is writing and the translating work she is supposed to do -- the fourth volume of a memoir by a French-Canadian writer and Holocaust survivor. She spends a good deal of time cleaning, which she knows is metaphoric. Reta also writes letters to editors each time a new list of the most important artists or thinkers appears if it neglects to include a woman. She closes one of them:

“My only hope is that my daughter, her name is Norah, will not pick up a copy of this magazine, read this page, and understand, as I have for the first time, how casually and completely she is shut out of the universe. I have two other daughters too -- Christine, Natalie -- and I worry about them both. All the time.”

Shields is a consummate master of tone and acute psychological insight, and Reta’s voice gives the book its depth and its humor, as when she says, “Norah’s efflorescence of goodness” is “killing us.”

As compared to Shields’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Stone Diaries,” which covered the entire lifespan of its main character, this novel inscribes a rather small circle. Yet in Reta’s thinking about her daily, personal life, Shields engages all the big questions:

Why do women have no power? What eternally ties a parent to a child? What finally constitutes goodness, as both a moral value and an act in the world? Why make art?

Shields has recently announced that she is in the late stages of cancer and said this is probably her last novel.

In it, she has Reta, her writer character, thinking about a life “spent affixing small words to large empty pages. We may pretend otherwise,” Reta says, “but to many writers this is the richest territory we can imagine. ... This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can’t stop doing it.”

Through many books, Shields’ writing has mattered. Her new novel is one of her most eloquent demonstrations of why it does.