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Unless by Carol Shields Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended)
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Loss Pain is at or close to the surface on every page in Carol Shields new novel, Unless. Protagonist Reta Winters, a 44 year-old writer, experiences loss when her nineteen year-old daughters drops out of school and life with a boyfriend to sit on an urban street corner with a sign around her neck on which is written a single word: “goodness.” Reta’s editor and publisher dies and she finds herself with a hapless new editor who wants to transform her and her writing into something it will never become. Shields draws us into an ordinary life with its pains and laughter and love, and leaves us thinking about hope and meaning, healing and care. Some pages will take your breath away with the pleasure of her writing, and her mastery of the nuances of ordinary life. Knowing that Shields is dying of breast cancer, and this will be her last book, makes the poignancy of reading it more real. Here’s an excerpt: “In the great, wide bed I had a disturbing but not unfamiliar dream – it is the dream I always have when I am away from Orangetown, away from the family. I am standing in the kitchen at home, producing a complicated meal for guests, but there is not enough food to work with. In the fridge sits a single egg and maybe a tomato. How am I going to feed all those hungry mouths? I’m aware of how this dream might be analyzed by a dream expert, that the scarcity of food stands for a scarcity of love, that no matter how I stretch that egg and tomato, there will never be enough of Reta Winters for everyone who needs her. This is how my old friend Gwen, whom I was looking forward to seeing in Baltimore, would be sure to interpret the dream, is I were so foolish as to tell her. Gwen is an obsessive keeper of a dream journal – as are quite a number of my friends – and she also records the dreams of others if they are offered and found worthy. She is, she claimed in a recent letter, an oneirocritic, having completed an extension course in dream interpretation. I resist the theory of insufficient love. I understand dreams to be an alternative language and one we don’t necessarily need to learn. My empty-fridge dream, I like to think, points only to the abrupt cessation, or interruption, of daily obligation. For more than twenty years I’ve been responsible for producing three meals a day for the several individuals I live with. I may not be conscious of this obligation, but surely I must always, at some level, be calculating and apportioning the amount of food in the house and the number of bodies to be fed: Tom and the girls, the girls’ friends, my mother-in-law, and various passing acquaintances. And then there’s the dof to feed, and water for his bowl by the back door. Away from home, liberated from my responsibility for meals, my unexecuted calculations steal into my dreams like engine run-on and leave be blithering with this diminished store of nurture and the fact of my unpreparedness. Such a small dream crisis, but I always wake with a sense of terror.” Women readers have been attracted to Shields because she captures a modern woman’s life so fully. Men who want to appreciate the lives of women will come away from Unless with insight and appreciation. Steve Hopkins, May 22, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the June 2002 issue of Executive Times Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com