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Overview
“A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.” — Los Angeles Times
The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless, is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life.
For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light 'summertime' fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060874407 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/03/2006 |
| Series: | P.S. Series |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 521,652 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.79(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Victoria, British Columbia, CanadaDate of Birth:
June 2, 1935Date of Death:
July 16, 2003Place of Birth:
Oak Park, IllinoisPlace of Death:
Toronto, CanadaEducation:
B.A., Hanover College, Indiana; M.A. (English), Ottawa University, 1975Website:
http://www.carolshields.comRead an Excerpt
Chapter One
Here's
It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I've heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But 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.
In my new life -- the summer of the year 2000 -- I am attempting to "count my blessings." Everyone I know advises me to take up this repellent strategy, as though they really believe a dramatic loss can be replaced by the renewed appreciation of all one has been given. I have a husband, Tom, who loves me and is faithful to me and is very decent looking as well, tallish, thin, and losing his hair nicely. We live in a house with a paid-up mortgage, and our house is set in the prosperous rolling hills of Ontario, only an hour's drive north of Toronto. Two of our three daughters, Natalie, fifteen, and Christine, sixteen, live at home. They are intelligent and lively and attractive and loving, though they too have shared in the loss, as has Tom.
And I have my writing.
"You have your writing!" friends say. A murmuring chorus: But you have your writing, Reta.No one is crude enough to suggest that my sorrow will eventually become material for my writing, but probably they think it.
And it's true. There is a curious and faintly distasteful comfort, at the age of forty-three, forty-four in September, in contemplating what I have managed to write and publish during those impossibly childish and sunlit days before I understood the meaning of grief. "My Writing": this is a very small poultice to hold up against my damaged self, but better, I have been persuaded, than no comfort at all.
It's June, the first year of the new century, and here's what I've written so far in my life. I'm not including my old schoolgirl sonnets from the seventies -- Satin-slippered April, you glide through time / And lubricate spring days, de dum, de dum -- and my dozen or so fawning book reviews from the early eighties. I am posting this list not on the screen but on my consciousness, a far safer computer tool and easier to access:
1. A translation and introduction to Danielle Westerman's book of poetry, Isolation, April 1981, one month before our daughter Norah was born, a home birth naturally; a midwife; you could almost hear the guitars plinking in the background, except we did not feast on the placenta as some of our friends were doing at the time. My French came from my Québécoise mother, and my acquaintance with Danielle from the University of Toronto, where she taught French civilization in my student days. She was a poor teacher, hesitant and in awe, I think, of the tanned, healthy students sitting in her classroom, taking notes worshipfully and stretching their small suburban notion of what the word civilization might mean. She was already a recognized writer of kinetic, tough-corded prose, both beguiling and dangerous. Her manner was to take the reader by surprise. In the middle of a flattened rambling paragraph, deceived by warm stretches of reflection, you came upon hard cartilage.
I am a little uneasy about claiming Isolation as my own writing, but Dr. Westerman, doing one of her hurrying, over-the-head gestures, insisted that translation, especially of poetry, is a creative act. Writing and translating are convivial, she said, not oppositional, and not at all hierarchical. Of course, she would say that. My introduction to Isolation was certainly creative, though, since I had no idea what I was talking about.
I hauled it out recently and, while I read it, experienced the Burrowing of the Palpable Worm of Shame, as my friend Lynn Kelly calls it. Pretension is what I see now. The part about art transmuting the despair of life to the "merely frangible," and poetry's attempt to "repair the gap between ought and naught" -- what on earth did I mean? Too much Derrida might be the problem. I was into all that pretty heavily in the early eighties.
2. After that came "The Brightness of a Star," a short story that appeared in An Anthology of Young Ontario Voices (Pink Onion Press, 1985). It's hard to believe that I qualified as "a young voice" in 1985, but, in fact, I was only twenty-nine, mother of Norah, aged four, her sister Christine, aged two, and about to give birth to Natalie -- in a hospital this time. Three daughters, and not even thirty. "How did you find the time?" people used to chorus, and in that query I often registered a hint of blame: was I neglecting my darling sprogs for my writing career? Well, no. I never thought in terms of career. I dabbled in writing. It was my macramé, my knitting. Not long after, however, I did start to get serious and joined a local "writers' workshop" for women, which met every second week, for two hours, where we drank coffee and had a good time and deeply appreciated each other's company, and that led to:
3. "Icon," a short story, rather Jamesian, 1986. Gwen Reidman, the only published author in the workshop group, was our leader. The Glenmar Collective (an acronym of our first names -- not very original) was what we called ourselves. One day Gwen said, moving a muffin to her mouth, that she...
Unless. Copyright © by Carol Shields. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.What People are Saying About This
“A brave, profound, and quirky novel with an undercurrent of the deeply amusing.”
“A wonderful, powerful book, written in a style which combines simplicity and elegance. I found it deeply moving.”
“A raw, subtle, inspiring novel about feminism, femininity, virtue, oppression and motherhood...I was inexpressibly moved by it.”
Reading Group Guide
Topics for
Discussion
Goodness:
1. Many
definitions for goodness are raised in the novel. Do you think that Reta ever
comes to a conclusion about what goodness is? If not, do you think she has
realized anything about the nature of
goodness?
2. What do you
think Norah means when she talks to her mother about not being able to love
anyone enough because she loves the world more? Do you think that Reta
understands what Norah is saying?
3. How would
you characterize Norah's relationship with her mother? How do you feel about Tom
and Reta's response to Norah's leaving? Would you describe them as 'good'
parents?
4. Why do you
think Norah decides to abandon her life and stand on a street corner? What do
you think that "goodness" means to her? Does it matter that we never learn why
the woman on the Toronto street corner set herself on fire?
Distraction:
5. Why do you
think Reta spends so much time thinking about Mrs. McGinn and the envelope she
found behind the radiator, even after she realizes that it's just a baby shower
invitation? How much of what we know about Norah comes from Reta's imagination?
6. Why do you
think it's so important for Reta to buy the perfect scarf for Norah? Do you
think the scarf matters?
Men and
women:
7. Do you
think there's any significance to the fact that Tom and Reta aren't married?
8. Consider
the scene when Reta has the theory of relativity explained to her by Colin
Glass. Do you think that Reta understands what Colin is saying? How would you
describe the nature of Reta's tone in this exchange?
Work:
9. Compare
Reta and Danielle Westerman. Name the attributes you do and don't admirein each
of them.
10. How
serious do you think Reta is about her work? What do you think about the fact
that she writes (but does not send) various letters about woman writers not
being taken seriously?
11. What's the
impact of Reta Winters being introduced through a list of her literary
achievements?
Writers
writing about writers writing about writers:
12. Are there
ever times when you feel like Carol Shields is narrating the book? If so, can
you identify particular moments when this happens? Do you consider this mixed
narrative style effective? Why or why not?
Silence:
13. Do you
have any ideas about why Lois is silent for most of the novel? What do you think
about the fact that she basically tells her entire life to Arthur
Springer?
14. The
novel's epigraph reads: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary
human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heartbeat
and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of that silence".
What do you think of this quote? Do you think it's an appropriate introduction
to the novel?