Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields (review)

It can be argued that Canadian writers, particularly novelists, continue to suffer from this culture’s inordinate desire to explain their work through their lives. Ultimately, it is their writing that suffers from our unwillingness to let fiction be fiction, to allow it its own wider amplitudes, untethered from facticity. Happily, this collection of interviews and letters, lovingly assembled by Eleanor Wachtel, makes clear everywhere that the writer’s life is interesting primarily as a life: Wachtel give us Shields’s background, her friendships, her rich experience, her sunny conversation all their due. At the same time, and in the forefront of the interviews, Wachtel asks Shields, expertly, the kinds of questions that allow the writer to comment intelligently on her work – without confounding or confusing life with art.

The ‘random illuminations’ are both the fortunate result of this method and one of the signatures of Shields’s fiction: we learn both that Carol herself, thinking about her life, recalls these arbitrary but precious epiphanies, and that sometimes her fiction is structured around, or represents, similar moments. We also learn that there is no direct equivalence between the writer’s experience and her art; more significantly, there are filaments of indirect connection.

Other than Wachtel’s public conversations with Shields, there is another dialogue threaded through the book, and it is the striking contrast between its two main structural constituents: one, the several interviews Wachtel conducted with Shields, beginning in 1988 and ending in 2002; the other, alternating with the interviews, groups of letters from Shields to Wachtel, beginning in 1990. This indirect dialogue presents two Carols: one, in the interviews, reveals the public figure that her readers have come to know over the last three decades, and also –thanks to the questions Wachtel poses – the writer commenting astutely on her own work. It is striking that Shields thinks The Stone Diaries was a rather dark book, but that Larry’s Party returns to more familiar comic territory; and it is interesting to find that Shields thinks of her short stories as opportunities for wider experiment than is the case with her novels. And it is interesting that Shields herself – like many of her readers – sees Unless as the most explicitly feminist of her fictions.

For readers interested in Shields’s life, the interviews collect in one place all of the familiar background: the comfortable middle-class childhood in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb; the 1950s expectations of marriage and children fulfilled; the relatively late start on writing. Perhaps less apparently, but just as significantly, the interviews give us the life story of a person whose experience, by and large, most decidedly did not conform to contemporary ideas of an artist’s life. What is always surprising – and enlightening – about Shields’s life is its serenity and simplicity, on one hand, and her unique generosity of spirit and abiding curiosity on the other. Less surprising, and confirmed here once again, is Shields’s inveterate reading practice: her terminal illness only intensified her eagerness to encounter others’ lives, and their ways of living them, in the verbal imagination.

The groups of letters reveal another, more personal Carol, solicitous and compassionate, commenting little on her own illness except in passing. Wachtel opens the book with ‘Scrapbook of Carol,’ her recollection of her own mother’s death in 2001, and records Carol’s emails of condolence to her; as well, Wachtel gives us the last email Carol sent her, on 30 May 2003 (Shields died on 16 July). The text is vintage Shields: mildly irreverent, wry, warm, and selfless:

30 May 2003

I’m getting my senses back, reading and writing with no more than the usual clumsiness. It seems a case of the crabby pill and stocking other pills for the hon degree. Bless you, dear human, for offering to read. I’ve just finished Jill Ker Conway’s A Woman’s Education. Hot, hot here, and heavenly.

Reading the interviews in one place provides an integrated and familiar portrait of the...