|
Editorial Review Product Description
I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I've had a look, and there's nothing down that road. Well now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabric, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep? 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. Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in 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. Amazon.com Review
"A life is full of isolated events," writes Carol Shields near the end of Unless, "but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define... words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, therefore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet." Shield's explanation for her novel's title lends meaning to this multilayered narrative in which a mother's grief over a daughter's break with the family revises her feminist outlook and pushes her craft as a writer in a new direction. The oldest daughter of 44-year-old Reta Winters suddenly, inexplicably, drops out of college and ends up on a Toronto street corner panhandling, with a cardboard sign around her neck that reads "goodness." The quiet comforts of Reta's small-town life and the constancy of her feminist perspective sustain her hope that her daughter will snap out of this, whatever "this" is. Threaded into her family's crisis is her ongoing internal elegy on the exclusion of women from the literary canon, which she transposes to mean her daughter's exclusion from humanity. Reta wonders if her daughter has discovered, as she herself did years before, that the world is "an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors," and has chosen to pursue the one thing that doesn't require power or a voice: goodness. In her own writing, Reta reaffirms her own sense of self, as well as her sense of humor. As her theoretical reflections on modern womanhood play counterpoint to her unwavering sense of creating a home and keeping her family together, Reta's smarts and fears form a wonderfully coherent narrative--a life worth reading about. With Unless, the inaugural title in HarperCollins's Fourth Estate imprint, Shields (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries) once again asserts her place in the canon. --Emily Russin ... Read more Customer Reviews (109) 
Empty story, some good writing
Carol Shields clearly has the skill to write sentences well. Unfortunately, the story line is the book is missing until about five pages from the end. Not worth the read unless you are a middle aged Canadian writer, worried about your teen daughters, caught up in the fact that you are passive and basically unhappy with the way feminism of the 70's and 80s turned out. If that's the case, you will love this book. This book bored me to tears. I only finished it for a book reading group and the fact that I had actually paid money for all of this pontificating and nonsense which took 320 pages to write.
I Read This Book So You Don't Have To
The story is interesting, the storytelling is easy to follow, and that's about where my praise ends.Unless is centered on a woman (Rita) who has lost her once-promising daughter to the streets, and how she spirals into despair because of it.She decides that her daughter "opted out" of life because she realized that, as a woman, much of life was already closed to her:excellence, respect, opportunities, etc. (all of which is true; anyone who claims we have actually reached equality should check out some statistics on violence, wages, eating disorders and heads of Fortune 500 companies).But whatever valid points she makes about gender discrepancies (she writes letters to men who have consciously or subconsciously slighted the female half of the world) are eradicated by her refusal to voice her grievances (she never mails them).How are we supposed to respect her demand for equality when she won't even voice that demand, and instead spends her days glorying in the triviality of polishing her banister and shopping?
I was willing to go along with Rita despite her uselessness-- after all, not everyone is cut out for activism.However, what irrevocably lost me is her outrageous pretension.She describes her expensive possessions in great detail, she seems to think that a daughter dropping out of college is the worst thing that could happen to anyone (probably because of her own liberal arts degree, she wants Norah to study linguistics), and everyone in the book seems to be upper-class and white (although she and her friends have the decency to be embarrassed about ordering a bottle of "good white wine" at a campy rodeo-themed restaurant).The clincher, though, is when a man comes to her house to deliver mulch and makes the mistake of telling Rita how he dreams of finding a job that pays enough to be able to marry his girlfriend and start a family.Rita describes his dreams as "so pathetically little"-- why?Because he's not learning French, like her?Because he's not writing a novel, like her?It's not only condescending, but downright hypocritical:she claims that her life is centered around her children, but this man is not entitled to center his dreams about his future children?
Of course, everything is wrapped up tidily at the end of the novel without Rita having to lift a manicured finger.Needless to say, I will not be checking out the other works of Carol Shields.
grief peppered with humor
My favorite chapters are the unsent letters that Reta, the narrator, composes to authors who acknowledge the influence of other male writers, ignoring female writers. The best is the one she writes to someone whose obituary she has just read. Feminism is certainly a dominant theme in this book, but so are family and grief. The grief, however, is not over a loved one's death. Reta and Tom's oldest daughter, Norah, has essentially dropped out, silently begging for money on a Toronto street corner, with a handwritten sign around her neck, bearing the single word "Goodness." This unfortunate situation consumes the lives of Reta, Tom, and their two younger daughters. I guess you could say that at least death has closure, whereas Norah's circumstances cause ongoing concern as winter approaches. The overriding mystery is what caused Norah to take the drastic step of dropping out of college to panhandle, but there's actually a lot in this book to savor. I loved that Reta's mother-in-law, Lois, has a file of 100 dessert recipes and brings dessert to dinner every night, as soon as Reta signals by closing the red kitchen curtains. Also, it's almost a book within a book, as Reta contemplates various endings for the novel she is writing, a sequel about a fashion writer who is engaged to a trombonist. Her new overbearing editor is a hoot, interrupting all her sentences and suggesting that she use a pseudonym, such as R. R. Summers. (Has J.K. Rowling started a trend?) You can imagine how our feminist protagonist feels about such a gender-neutral name. And, of course, everyone has a theory as to why Norah has checked out. The author drops a hint early on but not large enough for me to put two and two together.
Beautiful and imaginative
This is a "gauzy" novel about a mother's reaction to her daughter's withdrawal from life and decision to panhandle on a street corner. By "gauzy," I mean that the prose is concise and reveals only certain aspects of the story and characters.There is plenty of white space to be filled by the imagination.The prose is not overburdened with details.The book is tinged with feminism and the idea that women are destined for "goodness" but not "greatness." I found this novel to be engaging throughout and imaginative.
A Book to Read Before You Die
According to Peter Boxall's "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," "Unless," by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Carol Shields, is a seminal work worthy of being included in the "canon" - at least, according to the first edition of that guide (according to the second edition, published this year, we can now safely die without reading "Unless"). Interestingly, while Carol Shields is (to a limited extent) included in the "canon," one of the major questions she asks in "Unless" is why women are so often excluded. In "Unless," the protagonist, 44-year-old writer, Reta Winters deals with the plight of her 19-year-old daughter, who has given up her life to sit on a street corner, by distracting herself with work on a "light novel." Her friend, Danielle Westerman, a famous author in her own right, believes that Reta is wasting her time writing frivolous novels, but for all of her serious work, Westerman is nevertheless excluded from the "canon," prompting Reta to wonder, "How does she bear it? All the words she's written, all the years buried inside her. What does her shelf of books amount to, what force have these books on the world?" What, she wonders, is the purpose of writing, especially for women, when their work is so easily dismissed? Although Reta believes that women writers are excluded from the greatness accorded the "canon," ultimately she finds a purpose to her writing because of the personal joy it gives her and the voice it gives to women.
One of the major themes explored in "Unless" is the issue of how women are allowed "[g]oodness but not greatness," in the words of Danielle Westerman, a feminist pioneer and Holocaust survivor whose memoirs Reta has translated. Westerman believes that Reta's daughter has dropped out of life to sit on a street corner, wearing a "GOODNESS" sign around her neck, because she "has simply succumbed to the traditional refuge of women without power: she has accepted in its stead complete powerlessness, total passivity, a kind of impotent piety." In a series of unsent letters to various men who have excluded women from, among other things, a list of the Great Minds of the Western Intellectual world, a list of problem solvers, and a list of great writers, Reta expresses her outrage with "how casually and completely [women are] shut out of the universe," agreeing with Westerman that Norah has escaped from life after realizing she has no possibility for greatness. Like Westerman and her daughter, Reta has been allowed goodness, but not greatness. Although her first novel, "My Thyme Is Up," sold well, it was not taken seriously as a work of art. According to a review in the "New Yorker," her book "is very much for the moment, though certainly not for the ages." Writing the sequel, Reta again plans a book of comic fiction, featuring the dim-witted Alicia, but her male editor believes her draft is "close to greatness" and "could be one of those signal books of our time . . . with a mere two or three shifts of perspective" - that is, by increasing the role of the male character Roman and exploring the theme of his search for identity. In other words, in order to attain "greatness," Reta must sacrifice Alicia, in her gendered role, and focus instead on an "Everyman" Roman and his "universal" search for identity. In deciding how to finish her book, Reta must also decide what the point of her writing is - is she writing to be taken seriously or is she writing for herself?
Ultimately, Reta decides she is writing for herself - for the joy writing gives her and because it gives her a voice. Reta begins work on the sequel to "My Thyme Is Up" as a "diversion" to forget about Norah; through her writing, she says, "I can squeeze my eyes shut, pop through a little door on the wall, and stand outside my child's absence." Whether she is working on a serious book or "light fiction" doesn't matter; it is the act of writing itself that gives her comfort, that redeems her. While out for dinner one night, Reta decides to "add to the literature of washroom walls," scrawling, "My heart is broken." This simple act serves to make Reta feel alive, to give her life: "At once I felt a release of pressure around my ribs. . . . I was allowed to be a receptor and transmitter both, not a dead thing but a live link." Unfortunately, her joy in writing the sequel is interrupted by her editor's comments on the draft. Whereas, before she had heard from him, her book had been her "darling baby" and "greatest distraction," now she dreads working on the book and stops writing. In the end, she rejects her publisher's ideas for Roman, not worrying about converting her book into a serious work of act but rather finishing it with a happy ending, "a convention of comic fiction," and asserts that her joy in writing is more important than how the book is considered by critics or whether it is included in the "canon." But it still begs the question that Reta posed about Danielle Westerman's work - that is, if her book is ignored, what then does it amount to?
Ultimately, the value of Reta's writing is that it gives her a voice. In a conversation with her friends, Reta realizes that men don't really talk to women. One of her friends says, "Men aren't interested in women's lives" - they don't care what women think and don't let women "enter the conversation." But even if, in the real world, the inner and outer lives of women aren't as important as men's, in popular fiction, they usually are. Reta acknowledges, "It is Alicia's skin I wear," and she refuses her editor's request to make Roman the center of her book. In "My Thyme Is Up," Alicia's - or Reta's - voice is heard, and that matters, even if her work is dismissed as inconsequential. The importance of Reta's voice is highlighted in a scene where she searches for "the perfect scarf, not the near-perfect and certainly not the impulse purchase we usually settled for" for her daughter Norah. Even though Norah provides minimal input for the scarf - she wants something blue and yellow - Reta conceives in her mind the scarf that will delight her daughter's heart and goes to twenty different boutiques in order to find it. When she does end up finding the perfect scarf, she shows it to one of her female friends, whose eyes tear up: "It's just that it's so beautiful. . . . You invented it, created it out of your imagination." Even if the scarf, like a book of comic fiction, may not amount to much from a world perspective, it is still important. While Reta can't control her daughter's life or her happiness, she can "provide something temporary and necessary: this dream of transformation." In other words, what matters is not the end product - the scarf or the book - but it is the act of not settling, of having imagination, of creating something your own, of giving others happiness that matters. Reta finds her voice not only in Alicia, the woman, but in Alicia the woman writer, who herself is a creator. Although Reta knows, as a writer, it is poor form to also make Alicia a writer, she can't help herself from exploring the area of writing, which "is the richest territory we can imagine. . . . This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it." Her writing does matter, she concludes, because it allows her to enter a conversation normally she is excluded from; it gives her a voice in shaping her own world. If she has to sacrifice that voice to achieve greatness, it is not worth it. Having her own voice recognized and heard is what matters.
Although Reta believes that women writers are excluded from the greatness accorded the "canon," ultimately she finds a purpose to her writing because of the personal joy it gives her and the voice it gives to women. As a reader, I admit, I read "Unless" only because it was included in the "canon," as I am trying to become more well-read and add books from Dr. Boxall's guide of 1001 important works to my collection. But, the truth is, I will be lucky to make it through even one-tenth of his list because I know, if I tried reading the whole list, I would quickly tire of trudging through accounts of dirty old white men and their supposed "everyman quest for identity," which neither interests me, gives me joy, or gives me a voice. The power in "Unless" - the thing that gives it a "force on the world" - is that it provides ordinary characters - ordinary people you meet in real life - with a voice. Even if Reta Winters isn't a universal character - i.e., she is not an Everyman but likely appeals only to women - and she is not struggling to find her identity, her struggle to make it through each of her ordinary days is still important. Her story may not be "one for the ages," but it is enough to provide readers with a transformative moment of happiness, and that is good enough for me.
... Read more |
Problemsolving for Olympians