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Unless: A Novel
Unless: A Novel
Unless: A Novel
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Unless: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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“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 Times

The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless, is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life.

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.


LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMar 17, 2009
ISBN9780061828164
Unless: A Novel
Author

Carol Shields

Carol Shields was born in Chicago and lived in Canada for most of her life. She is the author of three short story collections and eight novels, including the Pulitzer Prize -- winning The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party, winner of the Orange Prize.

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Reviews for Unless

Rating: 3.6548673102402023 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Pretty good, conceit piles upon conceit, a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer about writing with a couple of feminist rants thrown in. Some good bon mots though.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Not my favorite book. I admired the philosophical underpinnings and the feminist slant but found that the more I read, the less compelling it became. The plot and the characters became secondary mouthpieces to the ideas and opinions the author wished to express. The ending was not very nuanced.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm not quite sure what Carol Shields was trying to achieve by this book, other than she had a few (very important, obviously) opinions she wanted to get off her chest which she tried to weave vaguely into some sort of fictional backdrop.The gist of the book is that the protagonist is an author whose eldest daughter has gone off the rails, spending her days begging on a street corner with the sign 'goodness' around her neck. I can save you a few hours of your life by letting you know that really there's not a lot more too it than that, save for a few sporadic feminist rallies and some (very important, obviously) musings about the challenges her (very clever, obviously) author protagonist is going through. Yawn. Oh, I nearly forgot the (very clever, obviously) observations (and chapter titles) on subordinate conjunctions. Because as women we are all subordinate and ruled by dependencies. Do you see? If we had beards we could scratch them thoughtfully while pondering over that at length. I think I'm done with Shields. She's too consumed with her own writerly self-importance for my taste.2.5 stars - well, I've had no problem getting over to sleep this past week.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Rounded down from 3.5 starsNovelist Reta Winters is going through a crisis because her oldest daughter is suddenly living – begging – mutely on the streets of Toronto. (Reta & her husband & two younger daughters live in Orangetown, north of TO.)Full of Shields' characteristic insight into human nature, but I just couldn't seem to become invested in Reta who actually seemed a bit neurotic to me. Beautiful writing though.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Unless is the story of a woman trying to raise three daughters while living on the surface of things without doing any deep dives into what she is for or against. This changes when her eldest daughter withdraws from university and takes up living on the street, refusing to explain her actions. Everyone has an opinion on why this happened, which Reta sifts through in search of her own reasoning. Shaken out of happy contentment by worry over her daughter, Reta arrives at some realizations of her own about her moral centre and what she stands for. This novel is accused of wandering about, and in terms of the variety of subject matter that Reta sorts through, that critique has some merit. But what's observable is that no matter what subject she takes up to explore, it all leads her back to her daughter's plight and there is never any escape for long. It's about the search for outlets, and the search for reasons when there are no easy answers at hand. Reta herself is an author, and Carol Shields does some good meta-bits about this that make it work. I loved the ending, even though it felt a bit convenient timing-wise. A story that moves quickly but also hides considerable depth like this is an always welcome combination.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In this novel, 44-year-old Reta is trying to finished the sequel to a surprisingly successful light comic novel, working on translating another volume of her elderly mentor's memoirs, and trying NOT to worry about her oldest daughter. Her oldest, Norah, has dropped out of college, left her boyfriend, moved into a hostel, and spends her days panhandling on a Toronto street corner. She won't talk to her parents, she won't even talk to her sisters.It took me a long time to get into this book. It's choppy and vague, stilted and disjointed. But that is also Reta's life--worried about too many things, trying to hold it all together and support her other two teen daughters. Wondering where she and Tom went wrong, or if there is mental illness involved, or if the problems of being a woman in the world (ignored, talked over, seen as and valued as less) are just too much for Norah. Or is Reta projecting her own frustrations?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was Shields' last novel, a wonderfully clever, witty, complicated book about what it's like when one absolutely major thing in your life has gone seriously and inexplicably wrong, but everything else seems to be just fine. And about belonging to a gender that's continually overlooked by people of the other gender, and about being a writer trying to write about writing, and about how it's OK for women to interrupt each other but not for men to interrupt women, and about imaginary letters of complaint, and about what happens if you're afraid to ask the obvious question and try to explain things out of your own imagination, and about many other things.Such a shame that Shields' career as a novelist was cut short so early.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A book about listening to the silence. Reta is a writer, a mother, a friend, and a partner to Tom. The story of Reta revolves around her oldest daughter, Norah, disappearance and migration to a street corner in Toronto as a homeless, mute person. Why is Norah silent? Why is Lois silent? Why is Danielle silent? The book is set in the 2000 but covers a wide time range for woman and feminism. The sixties, seventies are the time periods when Reta was young and growing up. She is translating for an author who is a feminist prior to the sixties. The daughters are of next generation of females. The plot is perhaps a bit choppy but it is reveal by and through Reta’s thoughts, her writings and conversations that Reta has with others. This would be choppy and not linear. The reader knows right away that there is tragedy, that one daughter is missing. Then the reader finds out that after twenty some years, Reta and Tom are not married but Reta changed her name to Winter and she used to be a Summer. I think the book is purposely choppy as it is reflecting the anguish of Reta over her daughter Norah. Her inner life is revolving around the duaghter’s disappearance and ending up on a street corner with a sign that says GOODNESS. I think when life hands a person something like this, the thought life takes over. I think Reta is at first blaming self and probably always will blames self because early on she said she wished she would have “listened” when Norah came home and was trying to talk with her mother. A lot of this book is about “listening”. The epilogue by Eliot talks about hearing grass grow, squirrel hearts beat and the roar on the other side of silence. Reta silent when Gwen takes the scarf that she bought for Norah (do we let others steal from us what we need to give to our children), the silence of Danielle about her early childhood (Reta never asks), the fact that the new editor never listens to Reta and is always cutting her off. So I think the book is about writing, relationships, feminism’s but it is most about silence. The silence of writing (that quiet activity filled with so much noise), the silence of relationships (holding hands walking, sitting beside), the silence of unsent letters, the silence of women being constantly omitted or talked over. Love Shield’s writing.The characters were interesting, some are fleshed out well, others are slowly fleshed out and in Shields’ writing about Reta writing about Alicia and Roman we gain insight into how a author goes about developing their characters and how Shields herself develops her characters. I attended a meet the author event at my local library and the author talked about character development, and it fit so well with what was written here. Achievement; while this book was good. It was nominated and made finalists but did not win any significant awards. The author is the winner of the Pulitzer. The style of this book was stream of conscious, epistolary, conversations with others but mostly through Reta’s inner thoughts and her point of view. I enjoyed the style. I found the book to be readable. It wasn’t slow and it wasn’t agony to pick it up yet it was like listening to grass grow. Wonderful if you stop to enjoy the process.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Shields' final novel is exquisite. She packs more into 200 pages than I knew was possible. While not plot driven, the story is nevertheless intriguing. Reta Winters is a happy novelist, wife, and mother of 3 girls who's never experienced heartache until she discovers that her 19 year old daughter has dropped out of life and is sitting for hours upon the hard Toronto pavement begging, with a sign around her neck reading "Goodness". Norah won't speak to her family, and Reta, unable to break through to her, must try and carry on with her life.The best parts of the book are letters that Reta composes to various authors speaking out against the exclusion of women in their writings. "But did you notice something even more significant: that there is not a single woman mentioned in the whole body of your very long article (16 pages, double columns), not in any context, not once?" Reta becomes convinced that her daughters, as well as herself and all modern women, are undervalued and not recognized for their greatness or potential greatness. "What Norah wants is to belong to the whole world or at least to have, just for a moment, the taste of the whole world in her mouth. But she can't. So she won't."The reviews for this novel are quite mixed, but for me it was truly beautiful and said much that needed to be said. I've read only one other of Shield's novels, The Stone Diaries, which I loved, and I am sad to know that she's passed away. I can't wait to read the full body of her work.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm still ruminating on this as I just finished it about an hour ago. The book was definitely dark, but the ending made up for it without seeming contrived or unearned. Shields has penned a fascinating character study of one woman facing a year of loss and re-evaluation. With plenty of meta (just how much of Shields is there in Reta Winters?), a book within the book, and a fluid handling of time, this is a complex and carefully constructed meditation on what it means to be a Western woman at the turn of the 21st Century. There's also a slight feel of a mystery as Reta and her husband attempt to determine what has happened (or not happened) to change their daughter so completely.

    August 2007 COTC Book Club selection.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very deeply felt feminist book, in a way I haven't encountered lately. Not harsh, or angry; a sort of soft muted almost passive protest, yet one that came through very clearly, in those unsent letters Reta wrote. All those passive abstract words, adverbs and prepositions: goodness, unless, thereof, despite... "whatever" didn't quite stike the right note, though.A little too distanced from Norah, who I instinctively wanted to be the center of the book. But really it was about Reta, and I can accept that, her trauma of disconnect from her daughter.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The cover of this book makes it look like one of those 'Tragic Life Stories' that occupy a whole bookshelf in WHSmith and which I would rather have all my toenails pulled out than read. In contrast this book is actually very literary, unashamedly cerebral in tone, and has a crick in its neck from all the navel gazing it indulges in.The book's middle aged narrator has a nineteen year old daughter who has chosen to abandon the family home and live on the street, begging. Each of the book's chapters begins and ends with this central fact, meandering around like footprints in the snow that always lead back to the place they began. Though a good nine months pass during the course of the story, it almost seems that time is standing still, as the narrator indulges in the sort of introspection that is the luxury of the comfortably wealthy, trying to understand her daughter's actions. It reminded me a little of Erica Jong without the sex.Oddly enough, as the book reaches its last couple of chapters there is an unexpected flurry of action, as issues raised during the story are resolved. If there was any sense of disappointment in this, it was that we didn't get to hear any more about Mr Springer and his interference with the narrator's work. Their conversational exchanges were the highlight of the book for me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I tend to keep my hands off books with any version of the following back cover sales text: [main character] has all reasons to be happy, but.../then one day... Why do they keep doing this? Anyway, that is a different story, and - luckily, this one I did not keep my hands off.At first sight very simple, but at the same time a complex book of an immensely skillful author who managed to put some very important, very large topics in the least suspected places.The humor, the wisdom and the depth of the understanding for certain human treats is felt throughout the book, and I feel somehow honored to have read it, and that it has given me as much: I am happy to be a person who is able to hear what Carol Shields had to say. I only found out about this being her last work from one of the reviews here, and, knowing this, makes me look at the book slightly differently now. Still, I am glad I read it in a "neutral" state, without that information on the author (who was writing about the author who was writing about an author... ). One passage in the book spoke to me with the loudest voice, on pgs. 148/99 of my copy, where she is writing about the child going through the world unknowingly, confused and hesitantly looking for answers from adults who react as if they have always known everything, and who have apparently forgotten or have never known the unbelievable wonder of the world around them, so this adds to confusion. Their reactions to the child's comments vary from mildly amused to overhearing or ignoring. Their behavior implies to the child that it should know the answers already and makes the child feel ashamed and left out. This is an insight which is terribly important, and I have never read about it before in a book, or anywhere, not like this. I have certainly felt it, like all of us did, if we can or care to remember. Here are a few more quotes:Pg. 106: I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I've had a look and there's nothing down that road.Pg. 115 (invented quote): Goodness but not greatness. (what women are reduced to)Pg. 158 (of children): Three quarters of their weight is memory at this point. I have no idea what they'll discard or what they'll decide to retain and embellish, and I have no certainty, either, of their ability to make sustaining choices.Pg. 184 (of husband): We live in each other's shelter: we fit.Pg. 188 (of characters in the book): They yearn - and this is what I can't get my word processor to accept - to be fond of each other, to be charitable, to be mild and merciful. To be barefootedly beautiful in each other's eyes.Pg. 218 (of daughter/all women, invented quote): Subversion of society is possible for a mere few; inversion is more commonly the tactic for the powerless, a retreat from society that borders on the catatonic.Pg. 220 (of daughter/all women): What she sees is an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I first read this book in 2003. Even though it has stayed with me, I re-read it now for Canada Reads, and I"m so glad I did. I am about the same age as the main character, Reta Winters. I, too, have teenaged children and this story talks about the powerlessness a mother can experiences as a beloved child makes a life choice that is dangerous, and incomprehensible. When they are young, you can fix almost anything, but they grow up.....Unless is a story of power and powerlessness. Carol Shields looks at this theme as a mother. Reta Winters has a happy marriage and three healthy, intelligent teenaged daughters. Yet, she cannot save her oldest daughter, Norah, who decides to be homeless and beg on the street with a sign reading "Goodness" hung from her neck.She also explores power from a feminist perspective. As one other reviewer said, women can be good, but not great. Reta Winters makes up letters in her head that she would like to send to people who continue to ignore the contributions and perspectives of women writers. She is faced with an editor who thinks the novel she's writing can "graduate" from chick lit to a serious book by moving the focus from the female to the male character.The book relates the idea of power to greatness in a way that I grasped much more on my second read -- my first time through, I was far more tuned into the story of a parent struggling to understand her child. This time, knowing what happens to Norah, I tuned in more to some of the other messages in the writing.And the writing is powerful. From the first sentence, I was grabbed by Carol Shields' greatness as an author. This, and the Stone Diaries, are my two favourite books by this author.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I tried several times to read this book, but the writing style really bugged me and I simply could not get past the first chapter.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Enjoyed reading this over a few days.It made me think a little of the tradgedy of Ellen's short life. It made me think about writing. Reta's writing was cathartic, but not through a tell all about her circumstances, through a different lens. It me me think about writing a novel. I'm not sure I'm brave enough.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastic book. I've been a Shields fan for a long time, and this is a masterpiece.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really wanted to like this book but found it so flustrating to read. I was willing it along and just wanted it to be over. The actual plot of the book was interesting but with so much needless padding around it I felt like I was just wading through. I have a bit of a thing about finishing books that I start so I trudged on, even though this was a book club book and our meeting had already taken place. This book certainly wouldn't prompt me to search out any of Shields other novels. :(
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Unless left me with many things to think about and I could relate to the main character in her helplessness with a traumatic event concerning a child. I was touched on many levels (too personal to discuss), but I was also given a few giggles as well, after reading her letters to people who pissed her off. I liked this book so much I went and ordered six other books she has written, and, I am happy to say that once I am done with them there are plenty more to read!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as Larry's Party. Though I'm close in age to the narrator, I found I related more to her troubled 19 year old daughter, perhaps because I am not a mother. Really enjoyed aspects of the book but others not so much. The "Thyme" books the narrator was writing are not to my taste and all and found the description of them to be long and boring.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A pleasant story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A mostly melancholy book, but with lots of Carol Sheilds' unique insight, which I love. The concept of women being able to achieve "goodness but not greatness" was a major theme. This book made me think about women's roles, and mother-daughter relationships.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Half-way through this book, I was bored and about to give up on it."The examined life has had altogether too much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air."The narrator may have said this, but unfortunately she didn't practise what she preached; there was rather too much description of what was going on in Reta's head for my taste and nothing actually happened. But I gave it a second chance and it did improve. There was more information about what happened to Nora and how the rest of the family had reacted to it, Reta's new editor may have been annoying but at least his presence made the story perk up a bit, and the letters Reta wrote to men in her frustration at the invisibility of women in today's world were the best bit of all.Not really my cup of tea though.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I find that Shields's characters are usually rather boring, a little too anchored in their bourgeois reality. This might have also been the case, had Norah not been sitting on a street corner with her sign Goodness. This injects some mystery from the beginning in the story - why this act of rebellion? Why "goodness"? What prompted it? Reta's rationalizations become a very intimate and personal interpretation of woman's place in today's world: the silence, obedience, acceptance. I became engrossed in these discussions. The term goodness also bothered me: so mild and tempered - why not greatness? But as the story unfolds, we suddenly understand Norah's perspective. While the ending can be accused of being a little too pat, it does not take away from a profound discourse. An enlightening read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I hated to rate this book so low because Carol Shields writes exquisitely, and she writes about such important issues. But the book just dragged for me. I wanted to see it through to its end so I sped read most of it, slowing for portions that were just too good to rush. Her story was poignant, important and thought provoking, it just couldn't hold my attention in such long stretches of musing. I'm sure it's more of a reflection on my short attention span than it is on her book, but nonetheless I couldn't rate it the same as I would a book that I love dearly, even if her work deserves it, if that makes sense.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    By Pulitzer winner. Looks as women's powerlessness: goodness (women) vs. greatness (men).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved this book. I found it easy to read and good certainly relate to the character of the mother and also the daughter who tried to hold it all together for the family. I love Carol Shields' style. She explored many topics in the story including coming of age, women's issues and relationships.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    No question. This is a five-star book. I don't have a systematic rating descriptor so I make it up as I go along, but I'm thinking that for me five stars means that I would be reluctant to give this book away and I'll probably have it in my "death-bed reading pile" (which assumes, probably incorrectly, that I will feel like reading when I'm on my 'death-bed'). Anyway, this book was fantastic for me, where I am now. I can't ever speak for others and I have no expertise in English literature, but I reckon this book is just so far ahead of another (although different year) Man Booker listed novel I read recently ["A Cupboard Full of Coats"] that it must have been an all-time great novel which actually beat "Unless" in the year it was listed. (I just looked it up; "Life of Pi" won that year...haven't read it so I can't make a direct comparison). "Unless" seems to have everything going for it in terms of what I look for in a novel: a serious underlying theme; moments of humour; a readable story; contemporary 'western' setting so I can easily relate to it; language which rises well above what I can write (it's easy to achieve that but sometimes I read a book and imagine that even I could have put the sentences together); a believable plot; a satisfying (although not necessarily 'all tidily wrapped up') ending; at least one likable character; emotions (mine, and written about); and not overly complicated in terms of numbers of interconnected characters or plot lines. I'm just so sad that Carol Shields has died and now I've read all her novels.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    While I had sympathy for the author's situation while she wrote this book (she was dying of cancer) I felt she came off as pretentious and preachy. I didn't care about the characters and only finished the book because it was the book of the month for my Book Club.

Book preview

Unless - Carol Shields

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 was touched by the austerity of my short story—which was based, but only roughly, on my response to the Russian icon show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. My fictional piece was a case of art embracing/repudiating art, as Gwen put it, and then she reminded us of the famous On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and the whole aesthetic of art begetting art, art worshipping art, which I no longer believe in, by the way. Either you do or you don’t. The seven of us, Gwen, Lorna, Emma Allen, Nan, Marcella, Annette, and I (my name is Reta Winters—pronounced Ree-tah) self-published our pieces in a volume titled Incursions and Interruptions, throwing in fifty dollars each for the printing bill. The five hundred copies sold quickly in the local bookstores, mostly to our friends and families. Publishing was cheap, we discovered. What a surprise. We called ourselves the Stepping Stone Press, and in that name we expressed our mild embarrassment at the idea of self-publishing, but also the hope that we would step along to authentic publishing in the very near future. Except Gwen, of course, who was already there. And Emma, who was beginning to publish op-ed pieces in the Globe and Mail.

4. Alive (Random House, 1987), a translation of Pour Vivre, volume one of Danielle Westerman’s memoirs. I may appear to be claiming translation as an act of originality, but, as I have already said, it was Danielle, in her benign way, wrinkling her disorderly forehead, who had urged me to believe that the act of shuffling elegant French into readable and stable English is an aesthetic performance. The book was well received by the critics and even sold moderately well, a dense but popular book, offered without shame and nary a footnote. The translation itself was slammed in the Toronto Star (clumsy) by one Stanley Harold Howard, but Danielle Westerman said never mind, the man was un maquereau, which translates, crudely, as something between a pimp and a prick.

5. I then wrote a commissioned pamphlet for a series put out by a press calling itself Encyclopédie de l’art. The press produced tiny, hold-in-the-hand booklets, each devoted to a single art subject, covering everything from Braque to Calder to Klee to Mondrian to Villon. The editor in New York, operating out of a phone booth it seemed to me, and knowing nothing of my ignorance, had stumbled on my short story Icon and believed me to be an expert on the subject. He asked for three thousand words for a volume (volumette, really) to be called Russian Icons, published finally in 1989. It took me a whole year to do, what with Tom and the three girls, and the house and garden and meals and laundry and too much inwardness. They published my text, such a cold, jellied word, along with a series of coloured plates, in both English and French (I did the French as well) and paid me four hundred dollars. I learned all about the schools of Suzdal and Vladimir and what went on in Novgorod (a lot) and how images of saints made medieval people quake with fear. To my knowledge, the book was never reviewed, but I can read it today without shame. It is almost impossible to be pseudo when writing about innocent paintings that obey no rules of perspective and that are done on slabs of ordinary wood.

6. I lost a year after this, which I don’t understand, since all three girls had started school, though Natalie was only in morning kindergarten. I think I was too busy thinking about the business of being a writer, about being writerly and fretting over whether Tom’s ego was threatened and being in Danielle’s shadow, never mind Derrida, and needing my own writing space and turning thirty-five and feeling older than I’ve ever felt since. My age—thirty-five—shouted at me all the time, standing tall and wide in my head, and blocking access to what my life afforded. Thirty-five never sat down with its hands folded. Thirty-five had no composure. It was always humming mean, terse tunes on a piece of folded cellophane. (I am composed, said John Quincy Adams on his deathbed. How admirable and enviable and beyond belief; I loved him for this.)

This anguish of mine was unnecessary; Tom’s ego was unchallenged by my slender publications. He turned out not to be one of those men we were worried about in the seventies and eighties, who might shrivel in acknowledgment of his own insignificance. Ordinary was what he wanted, to be an ordinary man embedded in a family he loved. We put a skylight in the box room, bought a used office desk, installed a fax and a computer, and I sat down on my straight-from-a-catalogue Freedom Chair and translated Danielle Westerman’s immense Les femmes et le pouvoir, the English version published in 1992, volume two of her memoirs. In English the title was changed to Women Waiting, which only makes sense if you’ve read the book. (Women possess power, but it is power that has yet to be seized, ignited, and released, and so forth.) This time no one grumped about my translation. Sparkling and full of ease, the Globe said, and the New York Times went one better and called it an achievement.

You are my true sister, said Danielle Westerman at the time of publication. Ma vraie soeur. I hugged her back. Her craving for physical touch has not slackened even in her eighties, though nowadays it is mostly her doctor who touches her, or me with my weekly embrace, or the manicurist. Dr. Danielle Westerman is the only person I know who has her nails done twice a week, Tuesday and Saturday (just a touch-up), beautiful long nail beds, matching her long quizzing eyes.

7. I was giddy. All at once translation offers were arriving in the mail, but I kept thinking I could maybe write short stories, even though our Glenmar group was dwindling, what with Emma taking a job in Newfoundland, Annette getting her divorce, and Gwen moving to the States. The trouble was, I hated my short stories. I wanted to write about the overheard and the glimpsed, but this kind of evanescence sent me into whimsy mode, and although I believed whimsicality to be a strand of the human personality, I was embarrassed at what I was pumping into my new Apple computer, sitting there under the clean brightness of the skylight. Pernicious, precious, my moments of recognition. Ahah!—and then she realized; I was so fetching with my Ellen was setting the table and she knew tonight would be different. A little bug sat in my ear and buzzed: Who cares about Ellen and her woven place-mats and her hopes for the future?

I certainly didn’t care.

Because I had three kids, everyone said I should be writing kiddy lit, but I couldn’t find the voice. Kiddy lit screeched in my brain. Talking ducks and chuckling frogs. I wanted something sterner and more contained as a task, which is how I came to write Shakespeare and Flowers (San Francisco: Cyclone Press, 1994). The contract was negotiated before I wrote one word. Along came a little bundle of cash to start me off, with the rest promised on publication. I thought it was going to be a scholarly endeavour, but I ended up producing a wee giftie book. You could send this book to anyone on your list who was maidenly or semi-academic or whom you didn’t know very well. Shakespeare and Flowers was sold in the kind of outlets that stock greeting cards and stuffed bears. I simply scanned the canon and picked up references to, say, the eglantine (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or the blackberry (Troilus and Cressida) and then I puffed out a little description of the flower, and conferenced on the phone (twice) with the illustrator in Berkeley, and threw in lots of Shakespearean quotes. A sweet little book, excellent slick paper, US$12.95. At sixty-eight pages it fits in a small mailer. Two hundred thousand copies, and still selling, though the royalty rate is scandalous. They’d like me to do something on Shakespeare and animals, and I just might.

8. Eros: Essays, by Danielle Westerman, translation by Reta Winters, hastily translated—everything was hasty in those days, everything still is—and published in 1995. Hugely successful, after a tiny advance. We put the dog in a kennel, and Tom and I and the girls took the first translation payment and went to France for a month, southern Burgundy, a village called La Roche-Vineuse, where Danielle had grown up, halfway between Cluny and Mâcon, red-tiled roofs set in the midst of rolling vineyards, incandescent air. Our rental house was built around a cobbled courtyard full of ancient roses and hydrangeas. How old is this house? we asked the neighbours, who invited us in for an aperitif. Very old was all we got. The stone walls were two feet thick. The three girls took tennis lessons at l’école d’été. Tom went hacking for trilobites, happy under the French sun, and I sat in a wicker chair in the flower-filled courtyard, shorts and halter and bare feet, a floppy straw hat on my head, reading novels day after day, and thinking: I want to write a novel. About something happening. About characters moving against a there. That was what I really wanted to do.

Looking back, I can scarcely believe in such innocence. I didn’t think about our girls growing older and leaving home and falling away from us. Norah had been a good, docile baby and then she became a good, obedient little girl. Now, at nineteen, she’s so brimming with goodness that she sits on a Toronto street corner, which has its own textual archaeology, though Norah probably doesn’t know about that. She sits beneath the lamppost where the poet Ed Lewinski hanged himself in 1955 and where Margherita Tolles burst out of the subway exit into the sunshine of her adopted country and decided to write a great play. Norah sits cross-legged with a begging bowl in her lap and asks nothing of the world. Nine-tenths of what she gathers she distributes at the end of the day to other street people. She wears a cardboard sign on her chest: a single word printed in black marker—GOODNESS.

I don’t know what that word really means, though words are my business. The Old English word wearth, I discovered the other day on the Internet, means outcast; the other English word, its twin, its cancellation, is worth—we know what that means and know to distrust it. It is the word wearth that Norah has swallowed. This is the place she’s claimed, a whole world constructed on stillness. An easy stance, says the condemning, grieving mother, easy to find and maintain, given enough practice. A sharper focus could be achieved by tossing in an astringent fluid, a peppery sauce, irony, rebellion, tattoos and pierced tongue and spiked purple hair, but no. Norah embodies invisibility and goodness, or at least she is on the path—so she said in our last conversation, which was eight weeks ago, the eleventh of April. She wore torn jeans that day and a rough plaid shawl that was almost certainly a car blanket. Her long pale hair was matted. She refused to look us in the eye, but she did blink in acknowledgement—I’m sure of it—when I handed her a sack of cheese sandwiches and Tom dropped a roll of twenty-dollar bills in her lap. Then she spoke, in her own voice, but emptied of connection. She could not come home. She was on the path to goodness. At that moment I, her mother, was more absent from myself than she; I felt that. She was steadfast. She could not be diverted. She could not be with us.

How did this part of the narrative happen? We know it didn’t rise out of the ordinary plot lines of a life story. An intelligent and beautiful girl from a loving family grows up in Orangetown, Ontario, her mother’s a writer, her father’s a doctor, and then she goes off the track. There’s nothing natural about her efflorescence of goodness. It’s abrupt and brutal. It’s killing us. What will really kill us, though, is the day we don’t find her sitting on her chosen square of pavement.

But I didn’t know any of this when I sat in that Burgundy garden dreaming about writing a novel. I thought I understood something of a novel’s architecture, the lovely slope of predicament, the tendrils of surface detail, the calculated curving upward into inevitability, yet allowing spells of incorrigibility, and then the ending, a corruption of cause and effect and the gathering together of all the characters into a framed operatic circle of consolation and ecstasy, backlit with fibre-optic gold, just for a moment on the second-to-last page, just for an atomic particle of time.

I had an idea for my novel, a seed, and nothing more. Two appealing characters had suggested themselves, a woman and a man, Alicia and Roman, who live in Wychwood, which is a city the size of Toronto, who clamour and romp and cling to the island that is their life’s predicament—they long for love, but selfishly strive for self-preservation. Roman is proud to be choleric in temperament. Alicia thinks of herself as being reflective, but her job as assistant editor on a fashion magazine keeps her too occupied to reflect.

9. And I had a title, My Thyme Is Up. It was a pun, of course, from an old family joke, and I meant to write a jokey novel. A light novel. A novel for summertime, a book to read while seated in an Ikea wicker chair with the sun falling on the pages as faintly and evenly as human breath. Naturally the novel would have a happy ending. I never doubted but that I could write this novel, and I did, in 1997—in a swoop, alone, during three dark winter months when the girls were away all day at school.

10. The Middle Years, the translation of volume three of Westerman’s memoirs, is coming out this fall. Volume three explores Westerman’s numerous love affairs with both men and women, and none of this will be shocking or even surprising to her readers. What is new is the suppleness and strength of her sentences. Always an artist of concision and selflessness, she has arrived in her old age at a gorgeous fluidity and expansion of phrase. My translation doesn’t begin to express what she has accomplished. The book is stark; it’s also sentimental; one balances and rescues the other, strangely enough. I can only imagine that those endless calcium pills Danielle chokes down every morning and the vitamin E and the emu

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