"Everything depends on unless." With one deceptively simple sentence, Carol Shields can open a closed mind or pierce the hardest heart. She creates real people who laugh, ache, fall in love and out of innocence. At 44, Reta Winters has a companionable marriage; three intelligent, loving daughters; and a successful writing career. Without warning, her oldest, Norah, drops out of her comfortable life to sit on a Toronto street corner wearing a sign that says ‘GOODNESS.’ As Reta reflects on her life, on motherhood, the writing process, powerlessness, and humanity, the splendid Joan Allen gives her depth and dimension. Allen’s performance precisely captures Reta’s initial anguish and, later, her ironic perceptions and sense of humor. UNLESS is a beautifully constructed Chinese puzzle that leaves us surprisingly hopeful. S.J.H. 2003 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
For all of her days, Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light fiction, novels 'for summertime.' This placid existence cracks open one fearful day when her beloved oldest daughter, Norah, drops out of life 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.
Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Carol Shields' remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.
For all of her days, Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light fiction, novels 'for summertime.' This placid existence cracks open one fearful day when her beloved oldest daughter, Norah, drops out of life 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.
Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Carol Shields' remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.
Unless
Narrated by Joan Allen
Carol ShieldsUnabridged — 7 hours, 14 minutes
Unless
Narrated by Joan Allen
Carol ShieldsUnabridged — 7 hours, 14 minutes
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Overview
For all of her days, Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light fiction, novels 'for summertime.' This placid existence cracks open one fearful day when her beloved oldest daughter, Norah, drops out of life 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.
Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Carol Shields' remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.
Editorial Reviews
Reta Winters -- loving helpmeet to a doctor, mother of three cheerful daughters, and author of a successful comic novel -- has always considered herself happy, even blessed. Then her eldest child, nineteen-year-old Norah, briefly disappears and resurfaces as a panhandling mute on a Toronto street corner, holding up a homemade placard that says "Goodness." Shields's ability to use Reta's darkest fears to reveal the order lurking in chaos, without ever losing her light touch (Laurie Colwin comes to mind), is nothing short of astonishing.
Marvelously idiosyncratic, passionate and wise, Shields' tenth novel rollicks from beginning to end with sauciness and wit. The heroine is forty-four-year-old Reta Winters, who confesses her problems from the start: "It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now," she admits. The source of Reta's troubles is her firstborn, nineteen-year-old daughter, Norah, who recently dropped out of college and now spends her days on a Toronto street corner wearing a placard that reads "Goodness" around her neck. The reasons behind this erratic behavior are unclear. Reta obsessively wonders what went wrong while she attempts to write her second "comic" novel. The plot of Unless is secondary to its biting commentary, a fact that is destined to generate buzz among literary insiders but may leave readers looking for a traditional story less than enthralled. Plenty is said about the powerlessness of women, the absurdity of publishing and the denigration of our culture. The author laments the suppression of female writers by the male establishment, and she calls to task those who have elevated the lowest common denominator at the expense of originality, vision and talent. Shields never gets lost in the whorl of these discussions. Her feet are firmly planted, even as the pitiable planet spins.
—Beth Kephart
If I have any reputation at all it is for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone's amazement, a fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction,' or so it was described in Publishers Weekly. That cheeky self-description sums up the protagonist of Shields's latest, the precocious, compassionate and feisty Reta Winters, an accomplished author who suddenly finds her literary success meaningless when the oldest of her three daughters, Norah, drops out of college to live on the streets of Toronto with a placard labeled Goodness hung around her neck. Shields takes an elliptical approach to Winters's dilemma, slowly exploring the possible reasons why a bright, attractive young woman would simply give up and drop out. As Shields makes her way through Winters's literary career, her marriage and the difficulties she and her daughter face in being taken seriously as women in the modern era, she employs an ingenious conceit by tracking Winters's emotions as she tries to write a sequel to her light romantic novel while helping a fellow writer, a Holocaust survivor, work on her memoirs. As Norah's plight deepens and the nature of her decision begins to surface, the romantic novel turns dark and serious, and Winters faces a rewrite when her long-time editor dies and his pedantic successor tries to introduce a sexist plot twist. Reta Winters is a marvelously inventive character whose thought-provoking commentary on the ties between writing, love, art and family are constantly compelling in this unabashedly feminist novel. The icing on the cake is the ending, which introduces a startling but believable twist to the plight of a young woman who, in doing nothing... has claimed everything. The result is a landmark book that constitutes yet another noteworthy addition to Shields's impressive body of work. FYI: As revealed in an April 14, 2002 profile in the New York Times magazine, Shields, who has terminal breast cancer, believes this will be her last novel. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Unlike The Stone Diaries or Larry's Party, with their sweeping chronology of their characters' lives, Shields's new novel transpires over a few dark months. In elegant prose, it examines a woman's emotional journey following her eldest daughter's lapse into either asceticism or psychosis. The narrator, Reta Winters, lives with her physician husband, Tom, and three teenage daughters in a lovely suburban Toronto home. She has intelligent women friends and intellectual fulfillment translating the works of her mentor, an elderly French feminist. On the side, Reta is the author of a well-received novel of "light" fiction. However, the family's lives are radically transformed when her oldest daughter, Norah, leaves college and takes up begging on a Toronto street corner, wearing a sign saying "Goodness." Reta connects this act with women's essential powerlessness, while Tom suspects it to be post-traumatic stress. This remarkably liberal family maintains contact with Norah but doesn't intervene. Meanwhile, Reta distracts herself from her inner disquisition on loss, family, and the role of women by mentally manipulating the characters in her novel-in-progress and dealing with her fussy New York editor, who turns up just as the family crisis resolves itself. Finely detailed, thoughtful, and sometimes even humorous, this book is highly recommended for all fiction collections. Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
From Pulitzer-winning Shields (The Stone Diaries, 1994, etc.), a tale about existential disarray that's spiked with feminist outrage and leavened with womanly wit. Until her daughter Norah begins living on the streets of Toronto in the spring of 2000, Reta Winters "thought tragedy was someone not liking my book." She and physician Tom Winters have been together for 22 years (although, mildly nonconformist children of the 1970s, they never married), and Reta has a modest literary reputation as author of a comic novel, My Thyme Is Up. Shortly after Norah leaves home, Reta starts a sequel, and we find her grieving and "at the same time plotting what Alicia will say to Roman" in Thyme in Bloom. Art sustains Reta, but its self-appointed interpreters infuriate her, and she writes letters to pundits who have ignored women's contributions to culture, an omission Reta gropingly feels has something to do with her daughter's turmoil. But because she's too suspicious of generalities to trust "the self-pitying harridan who has put down such words," she never mails them. Her first-person telling of all this, often quietly heartbreaking, is just as often bitingly humorous. Much of the fun comes at the expense of Reta's bombastic New York editor, who professes to find Big Issues in what Reta sees as light fiction but who proves able, in the story's most blistering development, to see Alicia as a stepping-stone to Roman's development. Typical of Shields's unerring pacing, this nasty revelation is followed by a crisis revealing why Norah became a street person. Reta's observations are so shrewd throughout, each detail so perfectly placed, that readers may not notice that the editor is the only other trulythree-dimensional character. The philosophical questions don't emerge with the same brilliance as Shields's portrait of the writer or her modest claim for the importance of a female perspective on tragedy. Still, there's enough here to maintain her claim as one of our most gifted and probing novelists.
A landmark book...yet another noteworthy addition to Shields’s impressive body of work.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A brave, profound, and quirky novel with an undercurrent of the deeply amusing.” — Anita Shreve, author of Sea Glass
“A wonderful, powerful book, written in a style which combines simplicity and elegance. I found it deeply moving.” — Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat
“Finely detailed, thoughtful and sometimes even humorous, this book is highly recommended for all fiction collections.” — Library Journal
“Often quietly heartbreaking...often, bitingly humorous.” — Kirkus (starred review)
“Marvelously idiosyncratic, passionate and wise, Shields’ tenth novel rollicks from beginning to end with sauciness and wit.” — Book Magazine
“All novelists worth their fictional salt can create fine characters; Carol Shields creates lives. ” — New York Times Book Review
“Nothing short of astonishing.” — The New Yorker
“A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.” — Los Angeles Times
“With a poet’s precision, Shields dissects grief and makes coping with bad luck feel like domestic heroism.” — People
“A superb new novel...a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss.” — Time Magazine
“Some hefty perceptions, fortunately shared with us in this fine novel.” — Washington Post Book World
“The best of her novels...fearless, smart, funny, beautifully written.” — New Orleans Times-Picayune
“A fine book, poignant, witty, rich in character, vivid in its sense of place...surprisingly suspenseful.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Remarkably subtle and unsettling...one of those books that make you regret that reading is a solitary pleasure.” — Christian Science Monitor
“Luminous ... Shields is a consummate master of tone and acute psychological insight.” — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A luminous novel ...Shields writes with clarity, intelligence and generosity, finding meaning in most mundane details of home life.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A novel of...assured intelligence and defiant vivacity.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“When Shields is good she is very good. There are nuggets of pure gold in Unless.” — Newark Star Ledger
“An engaging, memorable novel.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Relentlessly fine...imagined with style and vigor, melancholoy and wisdom.” — San Diego Union-Tribune
“Closely observed moments create the kind of subtle textures and elegant prose that won Ms. Shields the Pulitzer Prize.” — Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Unless succeeds beautifully...Shields [is] an expert at illuminating the complicated dynamics of off-kilter families.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A fitting farewell from an author revered for her graceful, insightful writing...sparkles with wry humor and elegant irony.” — Hartford Courant
“Truly, a miracle of language and perception.” — The Oregonian (Portland)
“All the trademark Shields delights are robustly present: idiosyncratic plotting; limber prose...deep compassion...tart commentary and irreverent wit.” — Orlando Sentinel
“Entirely satisfying… Shields’ voice, tender and moderated at all times, remains wise and very readable.” — Houston Chronicle
“Shields’s novels and short stories are intensely imagined, humanely generous, beautifully sustained and impeccably detailed.” — Publishers Weekly
“A raw, subtle, inspiring novel about feminism, femininity, virtue, oppression and motherhood...I was inexpressibly moved by it.” — Rachel Cusk, Daily Telegraph (London)
“Her wisdom and generosity of spirit are visible at every turn.” — London Times (Sunday)
A wonderful, powerful book, written in a style which combines simplicity and elegance. I found it deeply moving.
A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.
Marvelously idiosyncratic, passionate and wise, Shields’ tenth novel rollicks from beginning to end with sauciness and wit.
Some hefty perceptions, fortunately shared with us in this fine novel.
Nothing short of astonishing.
With a poet’s precision, Shields dissects grief and makes coping with bad luck feel like domestic heroism.
A brave, profound, and quirky novel with an undercurrent of the deeply amusing.
A superb new novel...a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss.
Relentlessly fine...imagined with style and vigor, melancholoy and wisdom.
A luminous novel ...Shields writes with clarity, intelligence and generosity, finding meaning in most mundane details of home life.
Closely observed moments create the kind of subtle textures and elegant prose that won Ms. Shields the Pulitzer Prize.
A novel of...assured intelligence and defiant vivacity.
When Shields is good she is very good. There are nuggets of pure gold in Unless.
Unless succeeds beautifully...Shields [is] an expert at illuminating the complicated dynamics of off-kilter families.
A raw, subtle, inspiring novel about feminism, femininity, virtue, oppression and motherhood...I was inexpressibly moved by it.
Truly, a miracle of language and perception.
Remarkably subtle and unsettling...one of those books that make you regret that reading is a solitary pleasure.
All novelists worth their fictional salt can create fine characters; Carol Shields creates lives.
An engaging, memorable novel.
Her wisdom and generosity of spirit are visible at every turn.
The best of her novels...fearless, smart, funny, beautifully written.
Luminous ... Shields is a consummate master of tone and acute psychological insight.
All the trademark Shields delights are robustly present: idiosyncratic plotting; limber prose...deep compassion...tart commentary and irreverent wit.
A fine book, poignant, witty, rich in character, vivid in its sense of place...surprisingly suspenseful.
Entirely satisfying… Shields’ voice, tender and moderated at all times, remains wise and very readable.
A fitting farewell from an author revered for her graceful, insightful writing...sparkles with wry humor and elegant irony.
Nothing short of astonishing.
All the trademark Shields delights are robustly present: idiosyncratic plotting; limber prose...deep compassion...tart commentary and irreverent wit.
A novel of...assured intelligence and defiant vivacity.
A thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations.
A superb new novel...a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss.
Unless succeeds beautifully...Shields [is] an expert at illuminating the complicated dynamics of off-kilter families.
A superb new novel...a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss.
A raw, subtle, inspiring novel about feminism, femininity, virtue, oppression and motherhood...I was inexpressibly moved by it.
"With a poet’s precision, Shields dissects grief and makes coping with bad luck feel like domestic heroism."
"Everything depends on unless." With one deceptively simple sentence, Carol Shields can open a closed mind or pierce the hardest heart. She creates real people who laugh, ache, fall in love and out of innocence. At 44, Reta Winters has a companionable marriage; three intelligent, loving daughters; and a successful writing career. Without warning, her oldest, Norah, drops out of her comfortable life to sit on a Toronto street corner wearing a sign that says ‘GOODNESS.’ As Reta reflects on her life, on motherhood, the writing process, powerlessness, and humanity, the splendid Joan Allen gives her depth and dimension. Allen’s performance precisely captures Reta’s initial anguish and, later, her ironic perceptions and sense of humor. UNLESS is a beautifully constructed Chinese puzzle that leaves us surprisingly hopeful. S.J.H. 2003 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940173699671 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2006 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read 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.Videos
