Unless: A Novel

By Carol Shields

“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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061828164

Carol Shields

Carol Shields’s novels include Unless; Larry’s Party, winner of The Women’s Prize; The Stone Diaries, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Republic of Love; Happenstance; and Mary Swann. Dressing Up for the Carnivaland Various Miracles, collections of short stories, were later published as The Collected Stories. Brought up in Chicago, Shields lived in Canada from 1957 until her death in 2003.

Book preview

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 oil capsules

Reviews for Unless

[seriousgrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How do you carry on with your life when one of your children is mentally ill and choosing to live on the streets for no apparent reason? I read a review where someone called Unless whiney and self-indulgent. I'm sorry but if I had a loved one "lost" like that, I too would be fixated on their wellbeing. Are they getting enough food to eat? Where are they going to go when the temperatures are minus ten degrees (not including wind chill factor) or one hundred and two (in the shade)? Reta Winters is trying to be a mother to her two other teenage daughters while thinking these things about a third, her eldest. She is a wife going through the motions with her trilobite-obsessed husband. She is a translator while trying to write her own second novel. She is an aging woman, trying to stay relevant in the youth-obsessed world around her. There is a little trickery going on with Unless. Like mirrors angled so images are reflected to infinity, Unless is a story about a woman writing about a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer. The nesting dolls of feminism. Then there is the carefully disguised biography of her mentor, Danielle. Danielle is at once a strong holocaust survivor and a fragile French woman who relies on Reta for writing support. Finally, there is the mystery of why eldest daughter, Nora, insists on sitting out on a street corner with a sign that simply reads "Goodness."

[castlelass · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Norah had dropped out of university, she had parted from her boyfriend, she was pursuing a path to spiritual goodness, which the family couldn’t quite understand, she was detaching herself from the rest of us, sleeping in a hostel, and yes, begging money at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor in downtown Toronto – but everyone held out hopes that she would return to being the Norah we knew and loved.”

Protagonist Reta Winters is a translator and novelist with three teenage daughters. She is in a happy long-term relationship with the father of her children, though they never married. She has written one novel and started a sequel. Life has been going well for Reta when her eldest daughter, Norah, suddenly and significantly changes her behavior. She starts sitting near a busy intersection in Toronto, holding up a sign that reads “Goodness.” We follow Reta’s inner dialogue as she tries to figure out what has happened to derail her daughter’s life. As Reta puts it:

“I am going through some bleak days…. I, too, am hungry for the comfort of the ‘entire universe,’ but I don’t know how to assemble it and neither does [Norah]. I sense something incomplete about the whole arrangement, like a bronze casting that’s split open in the foundry, an artifact destined by some invisible flaw to break apart.”

This book is quiet but poignant. It is filled with beautifully crafted prose. Shields drives the narrative forward through Reta’s inner dialogue, as she tries to make sense of what has happened, while also carrying out the routines of daily living and writing her novel. The interactions of the characters provide an insightful look at the process of publishing, writing, translating, and editing. These scenes are often witty and humorous. By the end, I felt I knew Reta and would love to spend time with her.

Sometimes an author comes along that feels like she is speaking directly to me. Carol Shields is such an author. I plan to read all of her work. I simply love her writing and this book will be in my top ten books of the year.

[starbox_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The theme of this novel is quite a simple one- narrator Reta Summers is a writer, fluctuating between translations of the learned works of a French-speaking authoress and her own romantic fiction. With a long term partner and three children, her life would appear content- except that her eldest daughter- for no apparent reason- has 'dropped out', begging in the street and sleeping in a hostel.And so Reta takes us through her life; family, meeting with friends, work- always set against the impotent sadness of a mother unable to connect with her child. And she imagines...the side-lining of women in every aspect of society, which must, she feels, have caused Norah's rejection of her life.It was highly readable, with very incisive thoughts on life. I particularly loved "We have to live inside the history we're given, but must resist, like radicals, being made into mere creatures of a mere era."

[angelajmaher · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that I can really only categorise with that nebulous description of literary fiction. There is a story here but it is mostly character driven. There are themes of identity, loss, and feminism. Philosophy, even. In some ways it could also be looked as a teaching tool for writing. And yet it entertains as all good books should.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read the Pulitzer-winning THE STONE DIARIES years ago and MARY SWANN just last year, so UNLESS (2002) is the third Carol Shields novel I've had the pleasure of reading. It was also her last, as, sadly, she died the following year.UNLESS is an eloquent testament to the awful predicament of women as perpetual second class citizens in every culture, even in modern day Canada, where this Shields story is set. Protagonist Reta Winters, a doctor's wife and mother of three teenage girls, is a moderately successful novelist and translator whose eldest daughter, Norah, has suddenly dropped out of college and left her boyfriend, and now sits on a Toronto street corner every day with a begging bowl and a simply scrawled sign around her neck saying, GOODNESS. Reta is devastated and deeply disturbed by this and struggles to understand, even as she continues to go through the motions of everyday life, including working on her second novel, which itself takes a turn away from the light, comic romance it had been. She begins to see signs everywhere of how women's accomplishments - "... have been impeded by their generative responsibility ... Women were busy bearing children ... it comes down to biology and destiny. Women have been hampered by their biology." In trying to understand why her daughter has shut down, Reta comes to see, to believe - "... that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation ... and those like Norah ... like me, like all of us, who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing ... That's the problem."In fact, UNLESS, is every bit as powerful a statement of how women have been subjugated by men as is THE HANDMAID'S TALE, by Margaret Atwood (who is even mentioned briefly). There is also a rather tongue-in-cheek nod to the importance of writing, that "writerly impulse," or - " ... a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages ... This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it. "It would be too easy to simply file this novel alongside Atwood's under feminist fiction, and it would also be a tremendous disservice to Shields. There is just so much more to consider here. UNLESS is a complex and beautifully written novel on mothers and daughters, on marriage, on writing and the creative impulse itself. I was completely caught up in the life of this woman, Reta Winters. She was that real. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

[paradiseporch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[alisony-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[aseikonia · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[cecrow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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?

[bookconcierge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Digital audiobook narrated by Joan AllenReta Williams is a successful author and translator, a wife, and a mother to three teenage daughters. Her oldest daughter, Norah, is a 19-year-old freshman at university, when Reta and her doctor husband, Tom, discover that Norah has apparently dropped out, and spends her days sitting on a Toronto street corner, with a signed around her neck that reads simply “Goodness.” The mystery of how and why her daughter has come to panhandling in this way is the major plot point of the novel.However, this really isn’t a plot-driven story. It’s a character study: of what it means to be a woman, a mother, a writer, a feminist. Reta is worried sick about Norah, but she is still a wife, still meets friends for lunch, does laundry, buys gifts, works on her latest book, and she writes letters (which she doesn’t send) in response to articles she reads. Yet, while Reta continues to lead her life, she cannot stop thinking and worrying about Norah. I finished this book nearly two weeks ago, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I simply didn’t have the words to describe how I felt about it. The best way is to quote from the novel itself: “A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, works like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.....Unless, with its elegiac undertones, is a term used in logic, a word breathed by the hopeful or by writers of fiction wanting to prise open the crusted world and reveal another plane of being, which is similar in its geographical particulars and peopled by those who resemble ourselves.”This is the last book that Shields wrote, though it is the first by her that I’ve read. I cannot help but wonder how much of Reta’s internal dialogue was really Shields’. (The author died of breast cancer within a year after the novel was published.)Joan Allen performs the audiobook. She is a gifted actress, and is perfect for this work. She made Shields’ prose virtually sing.

[flydodofly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[dldbizacct · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[bookmarque · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I came to know Shields’s writing very late, but I am a fan now and very sad she died at a relatively young age. This book reminded me a bit of Roth’s American Pastoral, but without the whining and self-aggrandizement. The narrative is about a parent looking for answers as to why her child has gone off the rails. Reta, our narrator, doesn’t wear the blame hairshirt like Roth’s parent does.The crux of the story is Norah’s behavior - is she crazy or just happy and why is it that people’s happiness has to take a form that’s acceptable to the rest of us, even if it does no harm? We see this sort of thing a lot in the severe judgement of people who live a freer life, away from the restraints of dutiful society. If we don’t envy or aspire to it, they must be nuts or shirking some kind of responsibility. The way it wrapped was very neat and I didn’t catch the hint of it even though I recognized it when it was revealed. In between internal wrangling with how to live life and accept Norah’s self-inflicted homelessness, Reta writes letters to people who have done something publicly to denigrate women or a single woman. The thing that was interesting about the device was that after the 2nd or 3rd one, I began to be a little exasperated by them; knowing that each letter was going to bring a complaint about sexism. I want to believe this was deliberate. Did Shields feel the same way over her own exclusion as a writer? Do we tire of always having to point out the fact that women are ignored, short-changed or worse? Who tires of it more, the men who are the bad guys in most scenarios, or the women who constantly have to face down this behavior? It’s an interesting point.There’s also a thread of commentary about Reta’s output as a writer and translator. Her Thyme novels sound pretty horrible though, nothing like what Shields wrote herself and I’m not sure what to make of that? Did she feel railroaded at some point? Expected to write certain books? Edited into some more acceptable form of “women’s writing?”. Here’s a great paragraph that feels almost too personal for a novel -“I too am aware of being in incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer who is writing. I know perfectly well that I ought to be writing about dentists and bus drivers and manicurists and those folks who design the drainage beds for eight-lane highways. But no, I am focusing on the stirrings of the writerly impulse, or the “long littleness,” to use Frances Cornford’s phrase, of a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages. We may pretend otherwise, but to many novelists who go to the trouble of cloaking their heroes in loose crossover garments, turning them into painters or architects, but no one’s fooled. This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can’t stop doing it.”There’s more where that came from, too -“...a lash of sentimental static that was not quite elaborated into a thought.” p 34“I won’t - not now - tuck the ends of my sentences into little licks of favour…” p 20“...my two lost children, and their separate branches of selfishness.” p 76I have a feeling this book will end up on my best of 2017 list. Bold statement given it’s only February as of this writing, but when I make statements like that I’m usually right. Get thee to a Carol Shields novel, stat!

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[carebear10712 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Another book club pick that I just couldn't force myself to continue through. Maybe it didn't get a fair shot, but the book was just all over the place. It jumped around from time to time and location to location, without a rooted spot. I had no idea when the author was flashing back, or when it was present time. Maybe some people like books that aren't linear, but this one was too much to try to follow for me.

[librarycin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.25 starsReta is an author and translator. She is married and has three teenage daughters. Norah, the oldest at 19, has just gone to university, but for some unknown reason has dropped out and stands on a corner in Toronto, begging with a sign around her neck that reads “Goodness”. The story is told from Reta's point of view and looks at how she is handling what her daughter is doing and how she is holding everything together. The story does jump a bit to some backstory, as well. It started ok, but my mind did wander at first. It seemed to turn around in the last third of the book or so, when I seemed to find it more interesting. There was also some focus on Reta's current book, which I found mildly interesting.

[mirrani_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I honestly loved reading this book, even though I don’t really feel anything remarkable about it. The writing was beautifully done and the characters all seemed real and honest, with their own positives and negatives that pushed them forward. You can believe that this is a story that just happened somewhere and the author (it is written in first person) is telling the tale of the events in a certain point in her life. I thought the author writing about an author writing about an author jokes were a little too much and too frequent, but that is a little misleading, since they are scattered around in the book.At times the author takes off on a little bit of a tangent, dropping the story and wandering around a certain event or location and you never quite get back to where you were. Surprisingly, I found that I enjoyed those times, though I was still wondering what was happening outside of the memory or description of a basement. Would we see the basement again? Did this memory have something to do with the plot? I never really figured all of that out. Maybe it was meant to be that way, in order to add to the reality of the situation. If there were no rambling, then you would think it a work of fiction, and this book made me wonder if it was reality many times over.Out of everything, I think what bothered me the most was the total loss to the family of a daughter who was grown enough to be on her own. This girl was in college, then left to sit on a street corner, giving up everything she had for the sake of goodness. The parents, the other children, everyone seems beside themselves with this, are occupied with going over to where the daughter is begging in the city, hounding her all the time, though they say they just sit with her and don’t really do anything. Why the obsession? In some ways it’s needed for the conclusion of the story, but mostly the emotional distress isn’t really as believable because the daughter was already gone away to school when she started doing this. To be completely honest, don’t pick up this book unless you are willing to read a book through without stopping. This mystery-that-isn’t-a-mystery is something that will sit in your mind while you are reading the life story of the main character, who is an author. As she figures out how she is going to continue your work, one thought is subtly implanted in your head: What is going on with the daughter? To find out, you’ll have to start reading.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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...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.Reta Winters, her husband, Tom, and the two daughters still at home attempt to maintain a normal life while keeping track of Norah and trying to understand why she has voluntarily withdrawn from the world. Reta is increasingly convinced that the motivating force was Norah's realization of her powerlessness as a female. Goodness is possible, but not greatness. Reta's husband, Tom, a medical doctor, has a different theory. Reta maintains some sense of balance through her writing, perhaps because she has control over the words and characters that she doesn't have over her own life story.The Stone Diaries was my first Shields novel and this one was the second. I love the quality of her writing. I don't think she'll ever be among my favorite authors, though, unless the strong feminist theme in these novels is uncharacteristic of the rest of her work. As Reta processes what has happened to her daughter, she reflects on the powerlessness of women and the exclusion of women's voices in intellectual discourse. It's hard for me to identify with Reta because I've never felt powerless or voiceless. Maybe it comes from growing up in the South, where we have a tradition of strong women, or from the many strong Midwestern female role models in my family who were neither voiceless nor powerless even though many of them never worked outside the home.Reta is troubled by the absence of women in the literary canon. They're not absent in the canon of Southern literature – Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston. Is it possible to graduate from any Southern high school without first reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? The works of these authors seem to resonate with both sexes. On the other hand, Shields' feminist themes won't resonate with all women, let alone many men. By focusing so strongly on women's issues, Shields seems to place herself in the category of “great women authors” rather than the more inclusive “great authors” category.

[jenj5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[gcplreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[mischiefbec · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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. :(

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[1morechapter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.I love Carol Shields’ writing. This is only my second novel by Shields, but I have also read about 1/3 of her short story collection (with plans to read the rest). The first was the Pulitzer-winning The Stone Diaries, which I also loved. Something about Shields’ writing just speaks to me. I can’t really pinpoint it exactly — I just know that I would very much like to read all of her works at some point.Shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, Unless is a story about a mother’s grief and pain over her daughter, who is not dead, or on drugs, but IS, by choice, a street beggar. Norah just suddenly dropped out of college and is now on the streets. Reta, the mother, is an author and a naturally happy person. Up until this point she hasn’t really had any difficulty in her life. In fact, during an author interview:The radio host in Baltimore asked me — he must have been desperate — what was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. That stopped me short. I couldn’t think of the worst thing. I told him that whatever it was, it hadn’t happened yet. I knew, though, at that moment, what the nature of the “worst thing” would be, that it would be socketed somehow into the lives of my children.Though Reta has been with her children’s father Tom since they met, they have never married. Their relationship is a good one, but Reta has strong feelings about feminism and the role of women in society. She suspects that perhaps part of Norah’s problem lies in this area. Reta writes (but never sends) letters to editors and the like when she perceives an injustice has been done to women. An example:This will explain my despondency, and why I am burbling out my feelings to you. I am a forty-four-year old woman who was under the impression that society was moving forward and who carries the memory of a belief in wholeness. Now, suddenly, I see it from the point of view of my nineteen-year-old daughter. We are all trying to figure out what’s wrong with Norah. She won’t work at a regular job. She’s dropped out of university, given up her scholarship. She sits on a curbside and begs. Once a lover of books, she has resigned from the act of reading, and believes she is doing this in the name of goodness. She has no interest in cults, not in cultish beliefs or in that particular patronizing cultish nature of belonging. She’s too busy with her project of self-extinction. It’s happening very slowly and with much grief, but I’m finally beginning to understand the situation. My daughter Christine grinds her teeth at night, which is a sign of stress. Another daughter, Natalie, chews her nails. Women are forced into the position of complaining and then needing comfort. 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.Another strong passage:Because Tom is a man, because I love him dearly, I haven’t told him what I believe: that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded female otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang. That’s the problem.I could put a hundred quotes from the book in this review; it is a book I will definitely be keeping. If you haven’t read any of Carol Shields yet, I strongly recommend her as an author.

[cecilturtle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.