Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507250033
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: G-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY LUCY LEE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Carol Shields, an American-born Canadian author of several novels and short-story collections, is well-known in Britain and Canada. It was not until 1994, however, when ``The Stone Diaries'' won the National Book Critics Circle Award, that she was published in America. Now out in a new paperback edition, the book was also nominated for Britain's Booker Prize and won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
It has been touted as ``the poig-nant story of an `ordinary' woman's search for herself.'' Shields, who explains that her writing career didn't begin until middle age because ``I had all these kids,'' considers herself to be among the ordinary. ``None of the novels I read,'' she says, ``seemed to have anything to do with my life.''
In ``The Stone Diaries'' she examines love, art/creativity, work, relationships, language and memory, framing them within decades of the 20th century and personal milestones of Daisy Goodwill Flett's (i.e., Everywoman's) life. It is her exploration of universal themes rooted in everyday life that makes the book extraordinary and, still, ``a good read.''
The opening scene foreshadows Daisy's birth: ``My mother's name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only 30 years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband's supper.''
Mercy, an obese, plain woman with ``jelly-like features,'' best expresses her love through cooking. And although Daisy's father, Cuyler, is a ``pick-and-nibble fellow,'' he looks forward to dinner with his wife. In a kind of ritual foreplay, he shows his love by ``raising his eyes once or twice to send her one of his shy, appreciative glances across the table, but never taking a second helping, just leaving it all for her to finish up - pulling his hand through the air with that dreamy gesture of his that urges her on.''
Mercy dies giving birth to Daisy, but her presence lingers throughout the story. In a sense, she also gives birth to her husband: ``He knows that without the comfort of Mercy Stone's lavish body he would never have learned to feel the reality of the world or understand the particularities of sense and reflection that others have taken as their right.''
Daisy is adopted in infancy by Clarentine Flett, a neighbor woman ``half-crazed by menopause and loneliness and in mourning for her own unlived life, who ... leave(s) her husband forever, not because he beat her or betrayed her, but because he withheld the money ($2.50) she required in order to consult Dr. Spears about an abscessed tooth.''
They move in with Mrs. Flett's grown son, Barker. When Mrs. Flett dies, the adolescent Daisy is sent back to her father in Indiana. She makes friends, marries, becomes widowed on her honeymoon, and, at age 31, returns to Barker in Canada. She is ``a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck.''
Barker is a 53-year old botany professor - a bachelor who has put his sexual and emotional energy into his work. (``The green world with its varying forms brought out an exotic tolerance in him and kept him calm.'') Daisy's reappearance, however, shatters his calm and they quickly marry.
Like most of the men in Daisy's life, Barker is a more interesting character than she is. Some of the most memorable observations in the book are about him. (``The discovery at the age of 12 or 13 that the whole of the natural world had been classified, that someone other than himself had guessed at the need for this ordering, struck him like a bolt of happiness.'')
The portrait of Barker's ornery father Magnus - a man with a solitary, miserable life (especially his unlikely obsession with ``Jane Eyre''!) - is a small part of the narrative but is hauntingly touching.
When we read Magnus' feelings from his perspective rather than his wife's and son's, our feelings toward him change. And we are forced to consider one of Shield's central themes: Who, if anyone, is authorized to tell the story of a life?
Daisy notes that ``The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course, even our own stories are obscenely distorted.'' She wonders whether the story of a life is ``a chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression.''
Shields takes us on a circuitous path toward the answer. Her mixture of first- and third-person narratives is initially disconcerting but, perhaps because it's explained in the story, it works. (The narrator tells us, ``Daisy Goodwill's perspective is off. Furthermore, she imposes the voice of the future on the events of the past, causing all manner of wavy distortion.'')
And then there's the matter of form. The story is fiction but has the feel of autobiography and/or documentary. The insertion of period photos, recipes, newspaper clippings and letters, add ``authentic'' details. An extensive family tree preceding the story sets the reader up, right off, for a ``true'' story.
During Daisy's final illness, her intellectual daughter contemplates the questions she will ask her mother: Have you been happy? Have you found fulfillment? Have you had moments of genuine ecstasy? Has it been worth it?
But as she sits by her mother's hospital bed, ``they speak of apple juice, gravy, screams in the corridor, the doctor, who is Jamaican - this Jamaican business they don't actually mention.''
Because Carol Shields does not succumb to the drama of giving simplistic answers to difficult questions, ``The Stone Diaries'' is a reliable and gratifyingly subtle version of the complexity of life. In poetic language and with a wise and compassionate voice, it elevates the ordinary, thus doing much to illuminate our own lives.
Lucy Lee is a free-lance writer in Roanoke.
by CNB