Unless

by Carol Shields

Book Overview

"Nothing short of astonishing." -- New Yorker"A thing of beauty--lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations." -- Los Angeles... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0007141076
• ISBN13: 9780007141074
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

"Remaking the untenable world through the nib of a pen."

A mother's agonized attempt to help to her 19-year-old daughter Norah, a drop-out who now begs on a street corner with a sign saying "Goodness" around her neck, provides the framework for Shields's thoughtful and sensitive look at women's roles and the juggling acts they sometimes require. Reta Winters, a successful writer, believes at first that by writing a bright, perky novel about "lost children and goodness and going home," she will be "remaking the untenable world through the nib of a pen." But real life--and Shields's real novel--are, of course, much more complex than that. Despite the support of her two younger and very caring daughters, her empathetic husband, her friends, and Danielle Westerman, the French feminist whose books she has translated, Kate nevertheless discovers that trying to help a child who will not be helped is a terrible loneliness to bear: "I need to know I'm not alone in what I apprehend, this awful incompleteness that has been alive inside me all this time." Evaluating her life as a wife, writer, friend, mother, and, increasingly, feminist, Kate allows us to share her inner life, both as it is revealed in her writing and as she wrestles with Norah's "hibernation" on the street corner. Filled with dazzling images (an idea that has "popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn" ; women who have been "sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear"), this Shields novel is more meditative than many of her other novels. "I've been trying to focus my thoughts on the immensity, rather than the particular," Kate/Shields says. As she inspires the reader to share this immensity, she provides insights into the essence of who we are and who we might become. Mary Whipple

Missing the point?

I just finished this book and was completely inspired and moved by it. I logged on to see what other readers were saying and I have to say that I think they missed the point. Although this novel moves and is described as a narrative story (with a plot: beginning, middle and end) the more important thing I think is that Carol Shields uses this story to move forward a concept. That being that the female perspective, our narrative, our life story as a whole is not considered as important as the male story. (This idea was recently discussed when literary minds chose the TOP 100 books all time and they found very few female stories or writers on that list.) The character struggle the reader needs to focus on is not the daughter's story (although that would have made a fabulous book too) but the mother's struggle to try to understand how she and society had contributed to an otherwise healthy, intelligent, young woman's "dropping out" or "giving up". What's important here is not whether she as a character is correct in her assumptions of the "why" but the focus of her struggle through the event and what that shows about both her and our culture as a whole. I believe "goodness" is used specifically because it is considered a female trait. That said it's a good novel if you don't get that from it, but it's a GREAT novel if you do.

Delicious

I've read some of the other reviews about this book, and found some of them a little bit intriguing. One reader mentionned expecting a fast paced story, as you would find in a mystery or detective novel. This has never been what Carol Shields has been about. She writes in this case about a 44-year-old mother of three/author/translator who tries to cope with her oldest daughter seemingly turning away from life, choosing instead to beg at a Toronto street corner every day with a sign around her neck saying "GOODNESS".Other readers felt it had no plot. Again, Shields develops characters and not intrigues. She tells the story from Reta's point of view. The "plot" is in trying to comprehend the circumstances leading to her daughter's behavior, in figuring out if she, as a mother, has done something wrong, if the same thing will happen to her other children. Also, in figuring out what is goodness. Throughout the narrative, Shields exposes various forms of goodness. This book is filled with interesting, down-to-earth characters, expertly developped by the author. The story contains many humorous touches, not the least of which are Reta's letters to various authors, as she complains about the non-representation of female writers in male writers' essays.I hope you will enjoy this book as much as I did.

THOUGHT PROVOKING, BUT NOT A PAGE-TURNER

The reviews already posted seem to either love or hate this book, with the main reason for reader disappointment being the lack of a plot. Given the dramatic event on which the book hinges -- Norah, the responsible, oldest daughter of a loving family has suddenly dropped out of school and is spending her days panhandling on a street corner, wearing a placard with the legend, "goodness" -- it's understandable that many readers expected the book to be a fast-paced crime novel, focusing on efforts to "rescue" the daughter, who surely had been brainwashed by some cult. This is one way the story could have been developed, but it's not Carol Shields' way. Instead, the family remains loving but helpless, reluctantly going on with their lives. Reta, Norah's devastated mother, continues to cook casseroles, meet friends for coffee, and most of all continue work on a lighthearted novel she is writing.Reta herself wonders how she can concentrate on fiction when her daughter is living on the street. But her novel is a refuge, a world she can control, where the characters do her bidding. (As a writer of fiction, I found Reta's characters admirably compliant, unlike the way my own sometimes behave.) When she is not deciding the direction of her novel, she spends much of her mental and emotional energy trying to figure out what has driven Norah to a life on the streets, and what is the meaning of "goodness." I found Reta convincing. Her concern for her family, her reliance on her friends and her work all lend her credibility. (One reader couldn't believe that the family wouldn't have forcibly dragged Norah off the streets and gotten her into mental health treatment, rather than simply visiting her with packages of warm clothes and food; I'm not familiar with Canadian laws, but I question whether they could legally have done so in the case of an adult daughter.) But Norah herself remained a shadowy figure to me. Reta seizes on the idea that Norah has "dropped out" because she recognizes that her talents and ambitions will be stifled by a society which gives little recognition to female achievements, but this seemed projection on her part. I never saw any indication that Norah was either particularly ambitious or a strong feminist.I have to confess that I was one of those frustrated by the slow pacing at the novel's beginning. But as I read further, I could see how carefully Shields was spinning out her story (and yes there is a story at the heart of the book). I also saw that unlike some books with terrific pacing and little else to recommend them -- such as the mysteries I buy to read on plane trips -- I would remember and think about this one long after I had come to the last page. In fact, the diversity of reaction to this book suggests it would make a good choice for a book discussion group.

A Profound Novel under a Cloak of Simplicity

Carol Shields is a powerful writer, all the more so because she writes in such facile prose that she is accessible on every level - the "story" of a Canadian family coping with focus of despair in an otherwise comfortable world, the "philosophy" of how we arrive at the state of adulthood only when we are able to remember and incorporate our hazy past, the "sociology" of what is happening to feminisim, to friendships, to geneology and inheritance in a family, the "spiritual" haven where finding internal goodness is more than enough of a Journey, the "didactical" means of writing a book. Now that covers a lot of ground! Shields builds the tension of this short novel with such honesty that we are at first put off that a good mother could seem to put the trauma of her eldest daughter becoming a street person in such a niche that she can proceed with cooking, tending her hausband and other daughters, having tea with friends, translating from the French the works of a Canadian femininist, and writing her own "light entertainment " novel while being confronted by editorial asides. It is just such a slice of ordinary life, living day to day because of and inspite of, that makes her final resolution of this marvelous novel so touching. Shields assigns each short chapter with "little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define" such as "therefore, otherwise, instead, already," etc. Most tellingly she uses one of these 'chips' as the title of this novel, and it is only half way through that she tells us why. " 'Unless' is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence." To attempt to review this novel with more words would be inadequate. This is the work of a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, one of the strongest, and most honest voices writing today. This is a treasure box of a book. Highly recommended.