September 1997
A talk with
Carol Shields
Interview by Ellen Kanner
Carol Shields has an affinity for mystery, for mazes, for riddles. To her mind, we're the biggest mystery there is.
"I've felt all my life that I was a kind of maze," says a woman in Shields' new novel "Larry's Party." "There was something hidden in the middle of me, but no one could find it, it was so deeply concealed." As in her 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Stone Diaries," "Larry's Party" tries to make sense of that interior maze, revealing the mad puzzle of our inner lives.
"I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people," says Shields from the University of Manitoba, where she is Professor of English. "That's why I love biography and the idea of the human life told or shown. Of course, this is why I love novels, too. In novels, you get to hear how people are thinking. That's why I read fiction."
It's also why she writes it. "Birth, life, love, work, death, this is the primary plot," she says and made this life arc exceptional in "The Stone Diaries," a work of fiction shaped like a biography. The novel's heroine Daisy Goodwill is an ordinary enough woman, but Shields makes Daisy resonant. Daisy speaks to and for all women.
What the author did for women, she does for men in "Larry's Party," a novel about Larry Weller, who in high school was "part of the jerk squad, president of nothing, member of no organization, unathletic, with barely average marks . . . an unmemorable smudge in the yearbook." While Larry is fictional, we have all known Larrys. Let's face it -- many of us are Larrys. But Shields writes not just with wit but compassion, rendering Larry's two failed marriages and an obsession with garden mazes in a way that give him tremendous dignity.
"Men are portrayed as buffoons these days and I was trying not to do that," says the author, "but men are the ultimate mystery to me. I wanted to talk about this business of men in the world."
Before she could talk about it, she had to try to understand it. Shields interviewed male friends and her husband of 40 years about how they live, what they want, how their thoughts connect. This kind of talk, she discovered, was new to them. "Some were all jocular and I could tell they weren't ready to talk about it. Some were touchingly grateful to be having this conversation. My women friends, we talk about everything, but men are deprived of these kinds of conversations. They need them, though."
Working on "Larry's Party" didn't narrow the gap between men and women for Shields. It did, however, make her "very glad to be a woman. Maybe women struggle more with this sense of who am I, but we have a greater reality base, a sense of where we really are."
Where Shields is now is a pretty good place. She is 61, the mother of five children and has a few grandchildren, besides. At a time when people tend to narrow their focus and get set in their ways, Shields has found a sense of liberation. "Larry's Party" is her eighth book and like "The Stone Diaries," it plays with form. The novel flows back and forth between 1977 and 1997 and closes with a tour de force, a chapter written all in dialogue between nine different and distinct voices. Her first four novels "were quite traditional," recalls the author. "I was interested in different structures, different ways of telling stories. Then when I reached middle age, I had a sudden sense I could do anything I wanted in the novel form -- it's enormously elastic and commodious."
Shields prizes this freedom to create, to deviate from traditional structure, which is one of the reasons the American-born author likes living in Canada. "It's been a very good country for writers. We don't have a long literary tradition. People aren't intimidated by the ghost of Hemingway and Faulkner. We're not big on heroes, either. The concept of heroes is alien, and I think that's a very telling piece of our national ethos -- no one deserves to be better than anyone else."
Perhaps it also accounts for her rather restrained response to winning the Pulitzer. The rest of the world may have been impressed by Shields' award. The people of Winnipeg were not, or if they were, they kept it to themselves. The biggest change in her life is now Shields' housekeeper comes in every week instead of every other.
The choices we make, the passions we possess, the ways we do and don't understand each other are the things that fascinate her. Our lives seem like riddles, like mysteries, but like mazes, as Shields' Larry explains, "they make perfect sense when you look down on them from above."
| 
