Carol Shields: Writing about 'ordinary people'

MARGIE THOMSON

From appearances, Carol Shields' life could have turned out very differently. She could so easily have been like a character from one of her novels - Daisy Goodwill from her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Stone Diaries, for instance, who "writes herself out of her own life."

Shields, too, could have lived with satisfaction in the relative anonymity of wife, mother, friend, finding her life markers in the lives of her loved ones.

That she didn't, and has instead become one of the English language's most respected literary novelists of the last decade - noted, to her continuing surprise, as a feminist writer, a voice for women - was not due to anger or rebellion. That would not have been in character at all. Instead, from the comfort of her suburban Winnipeg life, with her husband working steadily at the local university, and the youngest of her five children at school, she began, without fanfare, to write.

Poetry at first, a few published in magazines, a small collection, Others, picked up by a local publisher. Then, at 40, her first novel, Small Ceremonies, also published only in Canada.

Gradually, her life changed until she became aware that she had, without altogether meaning to, turned a page and entered a new chapter.

After that first novel, she "immediately wanted to write another," and did so: The Box Garden, in 1977. To those of us outside Canada it seems as if she suddenly appeared around the end of the 1980s, but that was when her books were picked up by the then small Fourth Estate publishing company in Britain. Publishing director Christopher Potter was trawling through small, off-shore publishers, looking for writers. He read Shields' four novels (by then she had added Happenstance and Mary Swann) and said, "We'll publish everything."

Since then have followed Republic of Love, The Stone Diaries and Larry's Party, which won the Orange Prize in 1998.

Through it all, her other life has continued unabated. Her four daughters, who to begin with just thought she typed more than other mothers, have now become her first editors, reading everything in draft, as do two of her best friends. (Her son, a lawyer, prefers John Grisham but loyally reads her novels once they're published.)

Her 43-year marriage to Don, who is dean of engineering at the University of Manitoba, continues happily, as do the marriages of most of her friends.

"It's something you don't find in fiction," she agrees, adding that one could write a good, dramatic novel about a happy marriage.

Shields is chancellor of the University of Winnipeg, a largely honorary position which affords her an office where, while at home, she goes to write most days.

Two years ago, into this calm landscape trod a Destructor: third-stage breast cancer, which laid waste Shields' peace of mind and changed the way she sees her place in the world.

Just two days after she spied the deformation in her mirror, she had a mastectomy and began six months of chemotherapy, during which she became "part of the unhealthy, funny-looking community," she says, losing her hair and eyebrows, making visible her shock at the sudden precariousness of life.

But then, she says, "probably no one at my age is certain of the future ... Cancer just seems to make everything you do more provisional, and all your plans are in a state of suspension."

One friend, also struck by serious illness, felt she had major things to achieve, including two trips to the Antarctic. Not Shields. In tribute to her happy life, she says: "I want to go on doing what I've always done, to keep living the same life in the midst of family and friends, and reading, going for walks and writing every day."

Shields is known as a writer who chooses "ordinary people" as her subjects, a label which "baffles" her, not because it's not true, but because, surely, most writers choose "ordinary" characters. Essentially, she says, she wanted to "write about people like me," to write the kinds of books she herself would like to have read: about women, friendships, family loyalties. Life, she says, is as much in the minutiae as it is in the big picture, and her stories certainly reflect this belief.

Yet Shields is anything but conservative when it comes to getting her stories down - she loves to play around with structure.

"The old-fashioned novel, with its linear writing and crescendo, I don't think that's particularly useful any more, at least not for women. With different structures, we can more accurately map people's lives which are messy, episodic. With my later novels I've had more complex structures. I've used the structure as a vehicle for telling the story. The structure gives a shape to the novel, it helps me keep it organised. I like to explore new shapes."

Shields' latest collection of stories is Dressing up for the Carnival (Fourth Estate). Written over the past 10 years, it seems particularly dark, but this, she says, is more to do with getting older than with illness. Most of the stories were written before the cancer was detected, and cancer is mentioned, in passing, in only one of the stories, Eros, in which a woman at a dinner party wonders whether a neighbour's sexual advances would cease if he knew of her mastectomy.

"I don't know," she says, "whether cancer will change my writing. I can only think that it may."

Her most recently completed project was a biography of Jane Austen - "not a scholarly book," she hastens to tell me. "It's a personal response to her as a writer." Part of a series of such books, it will be published by Penguin in a few months.

Shields is now gladly back in the process of writing a new novel, "which is a lot more fun," she says.

* Carol Shields' books are distributed by Archetype in Wellington.