Unless (review)

For a shortish novel, Carol Shields's newest, Unless, has a few different books inside it. There's the narrator's personal story, that of a hitherto happy woman named Reta whose college-age daughter has inexplicably parked herself on a Toronto sidewalk with a placard strung round her neck reading, simply, "Goodness." There's Reta's professional story, that of a writer attempting a sequel to her only novel, a light summer read called My Thyme Is Up. And running parallel to both is a reasonable but angry, often witty meditation on the way society consigns women to its margins.

At a different phase in her career, Shields might have given each of these books a life of its own. Unfortunately, Shields, the author of the Pulitzer-winning novel The Stone Diaries and the Orange-winning novel Larry's Party, has been fighting cancer. The title of Reta's first novel thus emerges as a bitter joke because the author's time is, if not up, then cruelly in danger of truncation.

Consequently, Shields seems to have elected to give us all three books at once. The result is a novel of questionable cohesiveness but assured intelligence and defiant vivacity. Its stories and themes cross and recross without ever quite braiding, leaving an impression of unforced naturalness that becomes lifelike almost to a fault.

Early on, Reta takes a moment to describe the writing of her friend and mentor, a feminist pioneer whose autobiography she is translating from the French. It's worth quoting this jewel-like passage because it may just be Shields's attempt to preempt the predominantly male critics who would pigeonhole her in some "women fiction" ghetto that insults women in general as much as it insults her in particular:

She had always claimed that she had little imagination, that she wrote out of the material of her own life, but that she was forever on the lookout for what she called putty. By this she meant the arbitrary, the odd, the ordinary, the mucilage of daily life that cements our genuine moments of being.

Write about life's mucilage, especially from a female perspective, and the literary establishment stamps you as quaint, a miniaturist, or worse. Shields surveys literary history and sees precious few women admitted to the pantheon.

Here's where Reta's daughter, Norah, and her passive panhandling come in. Almost everyone in the book sees Norah's silent renunciation of family and society as a reproach of middle-class life, of the complacency that allows the First World to ignore the sufferings of the Third. But "goodness" isn't just the opposite of evil; it's also the opposite of "greatness"—a laurel customarily withheld from countless female writers.

Seen in this light, Norah's street-corner vigil becomes a stand-in for the predicament of the "good woman writer." Passersby tower over her as they rush past. Some toss her a coin, less often a kind word. And ultimately, in a nicely earned ending that surprises readers without cheating us, everyone around Norah turns out to have the young woman's motives at least partly wrong.

What female writer doesn't know the feeling?

Unless is an odd title for a book, and Shields knows it. It's one of several chapter headings she uses with a rationale that doesn't come completely into focus until near the end, when, with her usual delicacy, she writes:

A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.

The word unless is another of these "chips of grammar," one that must have haunted Shields as she began a novel she couldn't finish unless...