Loss smashes glass of happiness

By MARGIE THOMSON

Carol Shields is one of the wisest writers in English, one of those who can plunge her needle into the apparently small matters of a life and draw out the universe, or display the world in a small, cosy pool of domesticity.

Like her protagonist in Unless, Reta, Shields was a wife and mother before she became a writer, and family continues to be central to her life. In an interview a couple of years ago she told me she was almost embarrassed to admit to her long and happy marriage (to Don, an engineering professor), and that her five now-adult children are the first to read her novels in draft.

I don't believe, therefore, that she is cynical (as one reviewer at least has suggested) about the choices women often make: to mould their careers around the requirements of housework, husband, children.

I do think she's cynical - deeply so - about the way the world (read: Male Establishment) sees, or doesn't see, women's achievements, and it seems obvious that some of this book's concerns arise out of her ongoing fight against breast cancer, and the weighing up of one's life that inevitably takes place as a result of such trauma.

"What force have these books had on the world?" she has Reta muse about the achievements of one of the important secondary characters in Unless, the 85-year-old feminist icon Danielle Westerman (a Simone de Beauvoir type), whose famous exposition of the female condition - "goodness not greatness" - haunts the pages.

Just as Shields has suffered shock and loss in the discovery and treatment of her disease and the consequent face-off with mortality, so has Reta, although her loss is of a quite different nature.

Unless depicts loss as an active force, in effect a searchlight into dark, unexplored territories of a life. The word that is the book's title reflects this exploration: "Unless," Reta says, "is the worry word of the English language ... everything depends on its breathy presence."

Reta Winters is 44, happily partnered with Tom, a doctor, and together they are the parents of three teenage girls.

Reta is also a writer, although she has approached her writing crab-like.

It began as an adjunct to her humdrum domestic life, progressed through the translation of Danielle Westerman's autobiography, to a point where her first novel, My Thyme Is Up, has been surprisingly well received, both by readers and critics, although it's firmly in the light fiction mould (a genre Shields herself is often mistaken as belonging to, probably because she is a woman writing within domestic scenarios).

As Unless opens, Reta is contemplating the sequel, Thyme in Bloom (the silly titles are greatly at odds with the quality of Reta's consideration of the characters and their predicaments).

Together, in their lovely house in the comfortable, rolling hills behind Toronto, the Winters are occupied with "the useful monotony of happiness". But, Reta tells us ominously on the first page, "happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life."

That glass smashes with the disappearance of their oldest daughter, Norah.

Aged 19, beautiful and talented, she's been living with her boyfriend and studying at university. Then she drops out and vanishes, turning up some days later on a city street corner "with a begging bowl in her lap, asking nothing of the world", giving away almost all that she's given through the day, and wearing on her chest a cardboard sign on which is printed a single word: "goodness".

Norah is "emptied of connection", and therefore lost to her devastated family, who continue to visit her, bring her food and money, but are met with blankness.

The need to understand what has happened drives the story on, and pushes Reta in the direction of feminism, admitting to herself "this awful incompleteness that has been alive inside me all this time but whose name I don't dare say".

She develops a theory that Norah has questioned the meaning of existence and found it empty, found herself excluded: "What Norah wants is to belong to the whole world or at least to have, just for a moment, the taste of the whole world in her mouth. But she can't. So she won't."

Other people, of course, have quite different theories, based on their own experiences and proclivities. Tom, for instance, favours the more tangible, single-incident trauma theory.

The answer, as it is so often in life, is rather a combination of circumstances. Suffice to say, the book's blurb describes the story as "ultimately consoling", so, while you will have many residual feelings by the book's end, gloom will not be one of them.

A new Shields novel is a treat in waiting, but of course one always worries that it won't be as good as the ones before - as good as The Stone Diaries, say, which won the Pulitzer Prize, or Larry's Party, which won the Orange, or as inventive as Happenstance or Swann.

Don't worry. Unless is a very special novel, supremely intelligent, emotionally rich, deeply moving. The overwhelming feeling as you reach the last page is that you want to read it again.

* Unless (Fourth Estate $31.95)