Unless (27 page)
Why have you been so silent all these months? I asked my mother-in-law, Lois. Why didn’t you tell us what was wrong?
Because no one asked me, she said.
But Arthur Springer did ask you?
Yes. He leaned across the kitchen table, his chair scraping on the floor, an oddly deliberate and intimate act, and said, “Tell me all about your life, Lois.”
And you
did
tell him?
Yes, I’m afraid I did. The poor man. Everything I told you, I told him.
No one, not even Tom, has ever said to me: Tell me all about your life, Reta. No one has ever offered that impelling phrase to Annette or Sally or Lynn. They swear it.
I phoned Arthur Springer and asked him directly: How did it happen that he asked my mother-in-law such an odd and intimate question?
“Well,” he said (abashed, I’m pleased to say). Hmm, he’d learned the technique recently at a publishing workshop on personal relationships that, hmm, Scribano & Lawrence had sent him to; this was after the author of
Darling Buds
went stomping off to Knopf. Something tactless
he’d
apparently said, a rather large fuss over a very small nothing. But he was asked to sign up for an immersion weekend on power relationships. Vermont; an old hunting lodge; a half-dozen humbled professionals. The key, he learned from the workshop director, was simple. One had only to ask people—especially writers, but anyone will do—for a recital of their lives, and they fall right into it. Its a harmless strategy, and effective. He’s only tried it out a few times, but always with enormous success.
“You didn’t say it to me,” I said. “You didn’t ask me to tell you all about myself.”
“Oh. Well, I could. Shall I?”
“No. It’s too late.”
“I’m so sorry, Reta. Really, I mean it. I do want to know all about the real Reta Winters. One day, when we have time.”
Meanwhile—another one of those signal words—meanwhile, I have brought
Thyme in Bloom
to a whimsical conclusion—Alicia triumphs, but in her own slightly capricious way—and the book will be published in early fall. Everything is neatly wrapped up at the end, since tidy conclusions are a convention of comic fiction, as we all know. I
have bundled up each of the loose narrative strands, but what does such fastidiousness mean? It doesn’t mean that all will be well for ever and ever, amen; it means that for five minutes a balance has been achieved at the margin of the novel’s thin textual plane; make that five seconds; make that the millionth part of a nanosecond. The uncertainty principle; did anyone ever believe otherwise?
Scribano & Lawrence expect a reasonable success. Mr. Springer withdrew his editorial reservations when My
Thyme Is Up
was analyzed exhaustively in an essay for
The Yale Review
by none other than Dr. Charles Casey, the octogenarian dean of humanities. The article, which came out in February, is a surprise reappraisal and appreciation, and the buzz has been picked up by the popular press, even
Entertainment Weekly
. The subversive insights of the novel had not been grasped, it seems, by its original reviewers two years ago. A correction is in order. What was simple is now seen as subtle. A brilliant tour de force, says Professor Casey, and this quote will, of course, appear on the cover of the sequel. The name Dr. Charles Casey will be printed in the same size type as the name Reta Winters, but I am trying not to think what that means. And I’ve noticed something else: Professor Casey’s clever perspective has caused a part of my mind to fly up to the box-room skylight, from whence it looks down on me, mockingly.
Danielle Westerman has given up on me. She has decided to translate her own book, and the portions she has shown me are both accurate and charming—yes, charming, that concept I thought I had given up on—but now I see that charm can be a gesture toward the authentic when it allows itself to be caught in the wings of an updraft and when it pushes its way into a different kind of cultural weather. She translates about a page a day, which she faxes to me for tweaking; I send it back within the hour, thinking every time I push the start button: What an elegant machine this is, sitting in its own corner so wise and respectful and willing when compared to the ugliness of an e-mail. She is adding to her memoir, writing about her mother, admitting, finally, that a memoir must have a mother somewhere in its folds. The two identities she never reconciled—daughter, writer—are coming together. Translation is keeping her mind sharp, she says, like doing a crossword puzzle. A daily task to begin and complete. She’s just turned eighty-six.
I am already thinking about the third book in the trilogy:
Autumn Thyme
. It will open to a wide range of formal expression. I want the book to have the low moaning tone of an orchestral trombone and then to move upward toward a transfiguration of some kind, the nature of which has yet to be worked out. I want it to be a book that’s willing to live in one room if necessary. I want it to hold still like an oil painting, a painting titled:
Seated Woman. Woman at Rest
. Half my work will have been done for me, at least for those who have read the first two books. These readers will stand ready to accept the fact that my Alicia is intelligent and inventive and capable of moral resolution, the same qualities we presume, without demonstration, in a male hero. It will be a sadder book than the others, and shorter. The word
autumn
taps us on the head, whispering melancholy, brevity, which are tunes I know a little about. A certain amount of resignation, too, will attach itself to the pages of this third novel, a gift from Danielle Westerman, but also the heft of stamina. There you have it: stillness and power, sadness and resignation, contradictions and irrationality. Almost, you might say, the materials of a serious book.
Day by day Norah is recovering at home, awakening atom by atom, and shyly planning her way on a conjectural map. It is bliss to see, though Tom and I have not yet permitted ourselves wild rejoicing. We watch her closely, and pretend not to. She may do science next fall at McGill, or else linguistics. She is still considering this. Right now she is sleeping. They are all sleeping, even Pet, sprawled on the kitchen floor, warm in his beautiful coat of fur. It is after midnight, late in the month of March.
I would like to thank a number of others who in one way or another encouraged me in the writing of
Unless
: Sharon Allan, Marjorie Anderson, the late Joan Austen-Leigh, Joan Barfoot, Clare Boylan, Marg Edmond Brown, Joan Clark, Anne Collins, Cynthia Coop, Patrick Crowe, Maggie Dwyer, Darlene Hammell, Blanche Howard, Isabel Huggan, Carl Lenthe, Madeline Li, Elinor Lipman, Anna and Sylvie Matas, Margaret Shaw-Mackinnon, Don McCarthy, Peter Parker, Bella Pomer, Christopher Potter, Linda Rogers, Carole Sabiston, Floyd St. Clair, Eleanor Wachtel, Cindi Warner, Mindy Werner, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and, as always, my family: John, Audrey, Anne, Catherine, Meg, Sara, and, especially, Don.
CAROL SHIELDS
’s books include nine novels and three short story collections. She was the winner of the Orange Prize for
Larry’s Party
and the Pulitzer Prise for
The Stone Diaries
. In the United Kingdom,
Unless
has been voted one of the fifty best-loved novels ever written by a woman.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise
for
Unless
“Classic Carol Shields…the lives she creates are lovingly delineated, shot through with a recognizable reality. The writing itself is perhaps better than ever…the tone throughout is measured, calm, now wondering and wounded, now overlaid with a light and exquisite irony. Lives may have cracked asunder, but wry comedy leavens the tale.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations upon the relative value of art, the realistic possibilities for women ‘who want only to be fully human’ and the nature of goodness…Shields touches gently upon some of life’s harshest surprises, acknowledges the fleetingness of happiness and reminds us how precious life is.”
—Jane Ciabattari,
Los Angeles Times
“[Shields is] unsparing as she explores the black holes of uncertainty in women’s lives. The book’s mysterious title reads like an epitaph: ‘Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re clear about your sexual direction, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.’ These are the dark thoughts of an illuminating novel.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Shields’s ability to use Reta’s darkest fears to reveal the order lurking in chaos, without ever losing her light touch…is nothing short of astonishing.”
—The New Yorker
“Like
The Stone Diaries
, which won Shields a Pulitzer Prize, and her tour de force follow-up novel,
Larry’s Party, Unless
presents itself, almost instantly, as a story about ordinary lives. But then, through her sensitive observations and exacting prose, the author proceeds to flip them over and show us their uncommon depths…a fine novel.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Reta Winters is a marvelously inventive character whose thought-provoking commentary on the ties between writing, love, art and family are constantly compelling in this unabashedly feminist novel…the icing on the cake is the ending, which introduces a startling but believable twist to the plight of a young woman who, ‘in doing nothing…has claimed everything’. The result is a landmark book…yet another noteworthy addition to Shields’s impressive body of work.”
—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“A tale about existential disarray that’s spiked with feminist outrage and leavened with womanly wit…[Shields] maintains her claim as one of our most gifted and probing novelists.”
—Kirkus
(starred review)
“Shields is probably our most intelligent and beguiling observer of the everyday drama of common existence.
Unless
is her most raw and intentful novel yet, centred on tragedy and loss rather than the more expected themes of marital connectedness, the delicate architecture of desire and the necessity of peace, although all these subjects have a place in this exquisite new work. The novel that Reta wants to write is ‘about something happening. About characters moving against a “there”.’ This is just what her creator has achieved, with a matchless sensitivity that makes you draw in your breath.”
—London Times
“A deceptively philosophical novel that succeeds in being both disturbing and reassuring in its multiple truths…the always polite, deeply subversive Shields has managed to expose, even explode, the artifice at the heart of fiction’s conventions, those slightly dishonest, unwritten rules of which everyone is aware but which no one really mentions…Shields, in common with many North American writers, possesses that mastery of the ordinary that makes fiction breathe.”
—Irish Times
“With characteristically magical prose and meticulous observation, Shields brings to life Reta’s anguish and bewilderment with a vividness that is so moving, so deeply felt, that you linger over every exquisite word, reading it and rereading it, never wanting the page to end. It is a masterpiece—in the most delicate miniature.”
—Daily Mail
“Shields shares with fellow Canadian Alice Munro not only her Ontario milieu but also a gift for psychological acuity expressed in limpid, shimmering prose.”
—Booklist
“Marvelously idiosyncratic, passionate and wise, Shields’s tenth novel rollicks from beginning to end with sauciness and wit.”
—Book Magazine
“A brave, profound, and quirky novel with an undercurrent of the deeply amusing.”
—Anita Shreve, author of
Sea Glass
“A wonderful, powerful book, written in a style which combines simplicity and elegance. I found it deeply moving.”
—Joanne Harris, author of
Chocolat
“
Unless
succeeds beautifully as a compelling mystery and a deftly affecting investigation into the concept of goodness…an immensely engaging narrative.”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution
“A more intimate novel than
The Stone Diaries
…imagined with style and vigor, melancholy and wisdom, using language that is not only apt but also poetic.”
—San Diego Union Tribune
“The best of her novels…fearless, smart, funny, beautifully written.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Closely observed moments create the kind of subtle textures and elegant prose that won Ms. Shields the Pulitzer Prize…an unusually touching novel.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Truly, a miracle of language and perception.”
—Portland Oregonian
“A joy to read—a writer working at the top of her game, bringing a remarkable intelligence to bear on both the human and the literary condition.”
—Financial Times
“A fine book, poignant, witty, rich in character, vivid in its sense of place, tight and trenchant in its observations, surprisingly suspenseful.”
—St. Louis Post Dispatch
“Remarkably subtle and unsettling…one of those books that makes you regret that reading is a solitary pleasure.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Luminous…Shields is a consummate master of tone and acute psychological insight.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Entirely satisfying…funny, stirring and then, with a twist at the end, complete…Shields’s voice, tender and moderated at all times, remains wise and very readable.”