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Product Description
Review
"Shields delivers a tour de force — a marriage is the culmination of a million tiny moments and she strings them together with intense cumulative power." —Publisher's Weekly
"A perfect little gem of a novel."—The Toronto Star
"A delightful portrait of a partnership, full of quirky humour between two people who are at once familiar and strangers to each other … a celebration of marriage as historical accident." —The Times (London)
"Carol Shields writes with delicacy and perception." —The Montreal Gazette
"A perfect little gem of a novel."—The Toronto Star
"A delightful portrait of a partnership, full of quirky humour between two people who are at once familiar and strangers to each other … a celebration of marriage as historical accident." —The Times (London)
"Carol Shields writes with delicacy and perception." —The Montreal Gazette
Book Description
These two unique novels tell the stories of Jack and Brenda Bowman during a rare weekend apart in their many years of marriage. Jack is at home coping with domestic crises and two uncouth adolescents, while immobilized by self-doubt and questioning his worth as a historian. Brenda, travelling alone for the first time, is in a strange city grappling with an array of emotions and toying with the idea of an affair. Intimate and insightful yet never sentimental, Happenstance is a profound portrait of a marriage and the differences between the sexes that bring life — and a sense of isolation — into even the most loving of relationships.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Luminescence,
By
This review is from: Happenstance: Two Novels in One About a Marriage in Transition (Paperback)
Happenstance, by Carol Shields, has a subtitle: Two novels in one about a marriage in transition. The book is split in half, one side with the woman's story, the other side with the man's. I am wallowing in this book, delighting in the details of Shield's phrasing, her descriptions, the atmosphere she creates with each scene.Brenda escapes to Philadelphia for a quilt show, and is housed with a mysterious fellow quilter who astonishes her upon first vision, and who then only appears as a scent of cigarette smoke, the shine of an open zipper, a tousled bed. Brenda meets a man at the same hotel for a different conference and somehow they establish a friendship that helps Brenda define herself, as a woman and a wife. Meanwhile her husband is living the kind of week we hope we will never see. Throughout their different experiences, they find themselves increasingly valuing each other. I believe we find our truest selves when we bump against people. We meet one person and almost fall in love with them on first glance - male or female, they become part of what we want to be, they highlight our sunniest spots, smooth over the rough bits, make us better than we are. There are people who we meet, try to know, but who feel to us like a rough seam, a tangle of yarn, an earring caught in the neck of a sweater - there is something wrong, but for a moment we can't isolate what that is. And there are the others, the ones who, upon first introduction, push us to show our worst selves, to fight, to be caustic, to revel in our shortcomings. All our life we are taught to treat all people the same, irritant or not. We are made to feel guilty if we don't like that person or this, if we actively seek to avoid certain people or can't be what those people want us to be. Shield's writing is transparently glorious in this book. She lays it on the table, the different kinds of relationships, the contact and strife points, the tendernesses that occur unexpectedly. Her characters THINK about things. I like that; I like the way they make me think about things. I like the way she makes me notice smallish things in my responses to others, things in other's responses to me. And through the everyday ordinariness of life, she provides luminescence. http://gilt-edged.blogspot.com/
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