Synopses & Reviews
“Unless youre lucky, unless youre healthy, fertile, unless youre loved and fed, unless youre offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.”Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck.
GOODNESS. With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Retas wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Retas voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour.
Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shieldss fiction.
About the Author
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935, Carol Shields moved to Canada at the age of twenty-two, after studying at the University of Exeter in England, and then obtained her M.A. at the University of Ottawa. She started publishing poetry in her thirties, and wrote her first novel,
Small Ceremonies, in 1976. Over the next three decades, Shields would become the author of over twenty books, including plays, poetry, essays, short fiction, novels, a book of criticism on Susanna Moodie and a biography of Jane Austen. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages.
In addition to her writing, Carol Shields worked as an academic, teaching at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba. In 1996, she became chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. She lived for fifteen years in Winnipeg and often used it as a backdrop to her fiction, perhaps most notably in Republic of Love. Shields also raised five children — a son and four daughters — with her husband Don, and often spoke of juggling early motherhood with her nascent writing career. When asked in one interview whether being a mother changed her as a writer, she replied, “Oh, completely. I couldnt have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. And my children give me this other window on the world.”
The Stone Diaries, her fictional biography of Daisy Goodwill, a woman who drifts through her life as child, wife, mother and widow, bewildered by her inability to understand any of these roles, received excellent reviews. The book won a Governor Generals Literary Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bringing Shields an international following. Her novel Swann was made into a film (1996), as was The Republic of Love (2003; directed by Deepa Mehta). Larrys Party, published in several countries and adapted into a musical stage play, won Englands Orange Prize, given to the best book by a woman writer in the English-speaking world. And Shieldss final novel, Unless, was shortlisted for the Booker, Orange and Giller prizes and the Governor Generals Literary Award, and won the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction.
Shieldss novels are shrewdly observed portrayals of everyday life. Reviewers praised her for exploring such universal themes as loneliness and lost opportunities, though she also celebrated the beauty and small rewards that are so often central to our happiness yet missing from our fiction. In an eloquent afterword to Dropped Threads, Shields says her own experience taught her that life is not a mountain to be climbed, but more like a novel with a series of chapters.
Carol Shields was always passionate about biography, both in her writing and her reading, and in 2001 she published a biography of Jane Austen. For Shields, Austen was among the greatest of novelists and served as a model: “Jane Austen has figured out the strategies of fiction for us and made them plain.” In 2002, Jane Austen won the coveted Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. A similar biographical impulse lay behind the two Dropped Threads anthologies Carol Shields edited with Marjorie Anderson; their contributors were encouraged to write about those experiences that women are normally not able to talk about. “Our feeling was that women are so busy protecting themselves and other people that they still feel they have to keep quiet about some subjects,” Shields explained in an interview.
Shields spoke often of redeeming the lives of people by recording them in her own works, “especially that group of women who came between the two great women's movements…. I think those womens lives were often thought of as worthless because they only kept house and played bridge. But I think they had value.”
In 1998, Shields was diagnosed with breast cancer. Speaking on her illness, Shields once said, “Its made me value time in a way that I suppose I hadnt before. Im spending my time listening, listening to what's going around, what's happening around me instead of trying to get it all down.” In 2000, Shields and her husband Don moved from Winnipeg to Victoria, where they lived until her passing on July 16, 2003, from complications of breast cancer, at age 68.
Reading Group Guide
1. At the beginning of
Unless, Reta Winters lists her literary accomplishments, almost providing a survey of her career. The event that is so central to this novel, Norahs disappearance, is mentioned almost as a side issue. What does writing mean to Reta Winters?
2. The bond Reta has with the members of her writing group are long-lasting, and at times she seems closer to them than to her family. What is Shields saying about friendships, and womens or writers friendships in particular?
3. In a recent interview about the subtle use of domestic detail in her work, Carol Shields commented, “Im always kind of interested in why people dont write about the things right in front of them.” What is the role of everyday life in this novel?
4. Carol Shields has always been known for her biting humour. How does she use this talent in Unless?
5. What stands in the way of Norah's happiness, as far as her mother is concerned?
6. Throughout the novel, Reta tries to understand her daughters absence by trying to determine the meaning of “GOODNESS.” What does Norahs sign mean - to Norah, to Reta, and to this novel?
7. Hardly, next, thereby, unless, not yet. . . . Carol Shields is famous for her wordplay, and in Unless her attention is focused on words and phrases whose meanings are elusive without context. For Reta, such words come to be intimately tied to the truth of what happened to Norah. Why?
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Q&A
1) Can you tell us how you became a writer?I was a word-conscious child. My terrible early efforts – by terrible, I mean derivative and unreflective – were encouraged by my teachers and parents. I loved narrative; I knew that very early. And the act of writing was for me probably the most spiritual experience in my life. It seemed only natural to write the kind of books that I wanted to read.
2) What inspired you to write this particular book? Is there a story about the writing of this novel that begs to be told?
I wanted to write a novel after writing a biography and I found the voice of the novel in a short story I had previously published, “A Scarf,” in Dressing Up for the Carnival. I wanted to write in the first person after many years of writing in the third person. A friend, Winnipeg writer Jake MacDonald, convinced me during one of our many long lunches that we novelists would be able to show more "decent" people in fiction if we wrote in the first person. His theory is that the third-person voice makes us nasty and ironic and less in tune with the world. I think he's right. I chose the voice of 44-year-old Reta Winters, a wife and mother, a writer and translator, who has suffered a grievous loss. This was the worst loss that I could conceive of: separation from a child.
3) What are you exploring in this book?
I wanted the book to be about four things: men and women; writers and readers; goodness; and mothers and children. While writing it, I learned about the primacy of the mother bond, about the opaque nature of goodness, about the choices observed by a novel-maker, and about the rather vast assumptions of our gendered world. I love a quote from Middlemarch, in which Dorothea talks about "widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." How heroic it is that men and women meet every day and attempt to work together despite the enormity of the difference in their power.
4) Who is your favourite character in this book, and why?
I love all of the characters in this book. I always end up in this kind of thralldom to my characters. I like Reta. I like her husband. I like her daughters. I like her mother-in-law. I even like the hateful Arthur Springer because I understand him.
5) Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of your book?
One is (and my own bookclub came upon this by chance), it is a very good idea for someone in the group to give a reading from the book. This helps the group to focus on the language of the book. A good question for Unless might be to ask: What has this book done to reinforce my feelings, or, the reverse of that, to ruffle my sense of self-worth. Another one is to ask: Does a reader demand a sense of closure, and what does this mean?
6) What question are you never asked in interviews, but wish you were?
Am I happy in my vocation? Interviewers assume that I am, and in fact this is true. I do feel fortunate to have found work in the world that I love to do – independent, creative work.
7) Has a review or profile ever changed your perspective on your work?
I had a review once of The Stone Diaries that said it was “too ambitious” (a particularly Canadian thing to say). That is when I began to discount reviews as a source of self-knowledge.
8) Which authors have been most influential to your own writing?
All of the authors I have ever read have influenced my writing. Alice Munro has shown us what the written word can do. She has been more than a model. Mavis Gallant has shown us what is possible in a fictional transaction. John Updike has been very important to me. Jane Austen has figured out the strategies of fiction for us and made them plain.
9) If you weren't writing, what would you want to be doing for a living? What are some of your other passions in life?
I would love to have been trained as a book-binder. I would love to be a pomologist; I am very interested in apples at the moment.
From the Hardcover edition.
1) Can you tell us how you became a writer?I was a word-conscious child. My terrible early efforts – by terrible, I mean derivative and unreflective – were encouraged by my teachers and parents. I loved narrative; I knew that very early. And the act of writing was for me probably the most spiritual experience in my life. It seemed only natural to write the kind of books that I wanted to read.
2) What inspired you to write this particular book? Is there a story about the writing of this novel that begs to be told?
I wanted to write a novel after writing a biography and I found the voice of the novel in a short story I had previously published, “A Scarf,” in Dressing Up for the Carnival. I wanted to write in the first person after many years of writing in the third person. A friend, Winnipeg writer Jake MacDonald, convinced me during one of our many long lunches that we novelists would be able to show more "decent" people in fiction if we wrote in the first person. His theory is that the third-person voice makes us nasty and ironic and less in tune with the world. I think he's right. I chose the voice of 44-year-old Reta Winters, a wife and mother, a writer and translator, who has suffered a grievous loss. This was the worst loss that I could conceive of: separation from a child.
3) What are you exploring in this book?
I wanted the book to be about four things: men and women; writers and readers; goodness; and mothers and children. While writing it, I learned about the primacy of the mother bond, about the opaque nature of goodness, about the choices observed by a novel-maker, and about the rather vast assumptions of our gendered world. I love a quote from Middlemarch, in which Dorothea talks about "widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." How heroic it is that men and women meet every day and attempt to work together despite the enormity of the difference in their power.
4) Who is your favourite character in this book, and why?
I love all of the characters in this book. I always end up in this kind of thralldom to my characters. I like Reta. I like her husband. I like her daughters. I like her mother-in-law. I even like the hateful Arthur Springer because I understand him.
5) Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of your book?
One is (and my own bookclub came upon this by chance), it is a very good idea for someone in the group to give a reading from the book. This helps the group to focus on the language of the book. A good question for Unless might be to ask: What has this book done to reinforce my feelings, or, the reverse of that, to ruffle my sense of self-worth. Another one is to ask: Does a reader demand a sense of closure, and what does this mean?
6) What question are you never asked in interviews, but wish you were?
Am I happy in my vocation? Interviewers assume that I am, and in fact this is true. I do feel fortunate to have found work in the world that I love to do – independent, creative work.
7) Has a review or profile ever changed your perspective on your work?
I had a review once of The Stone Diaries that said it was “too ambitious” (a particularly Canadian thing to say). That is when I began to discount reviews as a source of self-knowledge.
8) Which authors have been most influential to your own writing?
All of the authors I have ever read have influenced my writing. Alice Munro has shown us what the written word can do. She has been more than a model. Mavis Gallant has shown us what is possible in a fictional transaction. John Updike has been very important to me. Jane Austen has figured out the strategies of fiction for us and made them plain.
9) If you weren't writing, what would you want to be doing for a living? What are some of your other passions in life?
I would love to have been trained as a book-binder. I would love to be a pomologist; I am very interested in apples at the moment.
From the Hardcover edition.