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In March of 1994 Carol Shields, an American-born novelist, resident of Winnipeg, Manitoba, published The Stone Diaries, her seventh novel. Though backed by ecstatic reviews, it sold only moderately well here in Shields's native land: about 20,000 copies--far better than any previous Shields book. A paperback edition came out in April of 1995, her publisher having reasonably judged that the hardcover had exhausted its shelf life. Whereupon the Pulitzer Prize committee sprinkled some fairy dust: for the last nine months, stamped with the Pulitzer imprimatur, The Stone Diaries has been flying out of bookstores. There are now some 600,000 copies in print.
When an unknown author hits the jackpot, there are two inevitable results: (1) the lucky publisher will rush into print all other extant work, unpublished, underpublished, even unpublishable; and (2) the literati will limber up their critical muscle to tackle the quality question: is this that rare item, a popular author of genuine literary merit, or just another commercial hack with artsy pretensions? (Jealousy and instinctive cultural pessimism will incline them toward the less flattering judgment.) By happy coincidence, inevitable result #1 almost always provides ammunition for both sides in the lit. crit. squabble that inevitably follows inevitable result #2.
Carol Shields's first two novels, Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden, unavailable in the United States until now, could easily be dismissed as the early stirrings of a minor but ingratiating talent. They could also be promoted as proof that her particular concerns are enduring; that her wit is original equipment; and that her talent has matured in ways wonderful to behold.
Small Ceremonies, first published in Canada 20 years ago, charts a year in the circumscribed life of Judith Gill, wife, mother, biographer, and tireless, sharp-eyed, ironical observer of the unexceptional life around her. Her husband, a Milton scholar, has decided to weave in colored wool a visual guide to the thematic structure of Paradise Lost. Her 12-year-old son is grieving over the interruption of a secretive correspondence with an overseas pen pal. Her 16-year-old daughter has developed an odd, complicit relationship with Furlong Eberhardt, a leading Canadian novelist. Furlong writes maudlin national epics; Judith discovers, when she gets around to reading his latest, that he has lifted the plot of her own unpublished novel--a book she abandoned because she, too, had plagiarized. It seems that Furlong is not the man he pretends to be. These and other strands of low-stress plot are swept up in a comedy's conventionally tidy conclusion. Irony and sharp-eyed observation triumph.
The Box Garden is more or less the sequel to Small Ceremonies. The heroine this time is Judith's sister Charleen, a divorced single mother and lapsed poet--at parties she allows cheerfully that poetry is "a sort of minority interest. Like lacrosse." The sole employee of the National Botanical Journal, Charleen putters, on the verge of a stall, through a life still more circumscribed than Judith's. She has a 15-year-old son, a boyfriend, and her own pen pal (a high proportion of Shields's characters love to scribble letters). The pen pal, a monk named Brother Adam, sent her some time ago a packet of seeds from which she has grown a box-garden patch of ordinary grass. Indoor lawn care, for the moment, marks the extent of Charleen's creative urge.
More eventful than Small Ceremonies, The Box Garden takes us to the wedding of Judith and Charleen's widowed septuagenarian mother. Charleen's son is kidnapped by a well-meaning but batty family friend. Brother Adam's true identity is revealed. Things get a little hysterical, enough to give Charleen a necessary jolt.
Both books are funny, carefully written, and quiet. You might think this is polite, conventional fiction, capably executed. But Shields is asking, sotto voce, teasing questions about creativity in the lives of ordinary folk, and about the ordinary living creative folk do. Intently focused on the intersection of art and life, she asks where the energies come from for writing poetry or novels, for being a decent parent or spouse or child. She wants to know to what extent the domestic and the aesthetic can be separated into distinct spheres ruled by distinct moral imperatives. She's especially interested in biography, in the tricky business of how a life--ordinary or creative or both--gets reported.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.