Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction (review)

Published only one month before Carol Shields's death in July 2003, Edward Eden and Dee Goertz's Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction is the first substantial critical study of her work. (The interesting but more anecdotal Neil Besner-edited Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life has also been published.) Among the attractions of the collection is its inclusion of a previously unpublished essay by Shields herself. Adapted from an address given at Hanover College, 'Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard' provides a synthesis of Shields's best thoughts on writing and reading, on the need for narrative, and the limitations imposed upon the world's multitudinous 'story hoard' by language, literary theory, and genre. At once dense and lucid, 'Narrative Hunger' reveals not only the breadth of Shields's reading (the piece alludes at various points to Nabokov, Frye, Woolf, George Steiner, Annie Dillard, Barthes, and Eco) but also her abiding concern with what the novel has been, is, and might yet still become. A rigorous critique of the shortcomings of 'realist' and 'postmodernist' discourses, and a passionate defence of the necessity of fiction, it is required reading for anyone who cares about Shields's work and the ideas that shaped it.

The following nine essays take the ideas developed in Shields's piece as a template for their own discussions and are particularly illuminating in their analyses of Shields's equivocal relationship with postmodernism. The first section examines Shields's experiments with narrative form and genre; the second deals with her attempts to take 'a step beyond' the postmodern language game. Sarah Gamble cogently traces the 'patterns of repetition, doubling and exchange' in Shields's early texts and identifies their tension between linguistic and non-linguistic forms of creative expression. (Gamble's analysis does, however, omit reference to the poet narrator of The Box Garden and to that novel's engagement with Small Ceremonies.) Faye Hammill persuasively argues for The Republic of Love as a self-conscious revision and rehabilitation of the romantic novel, highlighting the elements of parody and polyphony which enable Shields at once to affirm and subvert the conventions of the genre.

The focus of four essays, The Stone Diaries is over-represented in this collection, as is discussion of Shields's 'use and abuse' of auto/biographical convention, a vitally important area but one already explored in much of the extant scholarship. Though individually persuasive, Wendy Roy's 'Autobiography as Critical Practice in The Stone Diaries'and Chiara Briganti's 'Carol Shields and Auto/Biography' inevitably cover some similar ground. Nonetheless, Dianne Osland's fascinating analysis of the intertextual echoes of Jane Eyre in the noveland Lisa Johnson's identification of an affirmative 'postmodernism of resistance' in Daisy Goodwill's 'revisions' of her life and in Shields's construction of the text itself contribute some genuinely fresh ideas to existing debates. Melissa Pope Eden's analysis of Shields's Austen biography and Goertz's examination of the 'sincere and ironic' use of symbol in Larry's Party are similarly insightful. Kathy Barbour's witty, idiosyncratic reading of Swann offers perhaps the most succinct account of Shields's double perspective: 'While seeming to affirm the postmodern premise that language is inherently incapable of conveying essential meaning, Shields is actually undercutting that assertion ... Shared meaning can be felt, understood non-verbally, through a gradual build-up of shared experience, and through goodwill and willing perception.' Finally, Hammill's comprehensive annotated bibliography directs readers towards all significant earlier works by and about Shields.

Narrative Hunger does not seek to provide an overview of Shields's production and may disappoint those hoping for discussion of certain aspects of Shields's work: the Canadian context, her collaborative projects, her poetry and plays. What the collection does highlight, however, is the complexity and paradox of the fiction of a writer still too frequently dismissed as, in Blake Morrison's phrase, a 'genial...