Customer Reviews

Unless: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Unless is beautifully written. It may be too subtle for many people (see reviews claiming it to be tedious), but if you look into her finely woven story, there are many layers of overlapping meaning. If you are not a feminist, Shields may seem to assume too much. Yet I find her feminism to be right on the mark, humble and poignant.
She points out the irony of writing about a woman who is writing about a woman writing. But going through the story, she teaches a clinic on how to write a story. I found it captivating and have read it repeatedly and recommended it to all the women in my life.
Shields also embraces the accusation that she writes about the small moments and small lives. This book was much more memorable than the Stone Diaries which was also fascinating.

I agree with the reviewer, Carrad's, statement, "Moaning for pages and pages and pages about how female authors and characters have been marginalized for centuries does not justify the artistic failure inherent in marginalizing all the male characters in the book, who are poorly-realized cardboard cutouts." The main character Reta is pretty presumptious about why her daughter has withdrawn from society and yet in the end the reason is something very different. Although I can see the realtionship and symbolism. But it seems that Shields uses this novel to ramble on about woman's plight of being powerless and other political musings. It just ends up being a very disconnected and uninteresting novel.

Carol Shields writes of a mother's worst fear....a child who detaches from society to live on the street. Throughout the journey, the mother microscopically examines her past and present in an attempt to understand why her daughter would do this.
Anyone who has ever had to face a loss like this could identify with Carol Shield's portrayal of a life that has gone awry.

Carol touches on many nerves and many issues in this beautifully written novel.

Unless is Shields' masterpiece, a treatise on womanhood, motherhood and personhood. Moreover, read carefully, it's a how-to guide of novel writing. Unless is a sad story with triumph at its core, and I will read it again and again as long as I have eyes.

If I was lazy I'd tell you that this is the book that Nick Hornby's How to be Good could have been (if Nick Hornby was even a fifth of the writer that Carol Shields is). Or I could say that this is a twenty-first century reinterpretation of When She Was Good, one of Philip Roth's earlier masterpieces.

Unfortunately, such laziness would do this rather wonderful and thought-provoking book a grave disservice - in that, although goodness - the idea of goodness, what it means to be good - is at the centre of this book, it shares that space with ruminations on the art of writing, and what it is to be a woman (and a woman writer, and a wife, and a mother, and a friend, and a person in the world) at the beginning of what we like to regard as a more enlightened time to be alive.

Reta Winters took her husband Tom's surname when they first got together (part of the reason being that she was originally Reta Summers and they both agreed that one of the seasons had to change). In lots of ways, this information (which is almost the opposite of a revelation, whatever the word for that is) contains the genesis of this novel writ small. They have three daughters together, Reta and Tom, the oldest of whom decides on the cusp of her nineteenth birthday to throw up her studies and live on the street with a simple cardboard sign - on which the word GOODNESS is written - on a string around her neck. Reta has no idea why her daughter has chosen this path and that - the abstract decision to withdraw from the life you are expected to live - throws the world out of kilter. To all intents and purposes life continues on as it did before (Reta and Tom still sleep together, Reta continues to write the sequel to her comic novel, the family entertain at Christmas). Beneath the surface, however, and within Reta, you realise that the world these characters inhabit has come to resemble nothing so much as the scab that forms over damaged skin.

The title of the book, and each of the chapter titles that follow, are made up of what Shields calls "little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs and prepositions) . . . words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already and not yet." These words act as the "odd pieces of language" that cement the isolated events in a person's life to form "a coherent narrative." The adverbs and the prepositions, the words you do not notice, commingle with Reta's attempts to rebuke the various men in positions of authority who continually overlook the debt history owes to women (believing in part that her daughter's complaint has been brought on as a direct result of NOT BEING HEARD - which, in a way, as the climax reveals, is the case).

There is grit here and pain (that all too human attempt to comprehend that which is beyond comprehension: the actions of others), and the writing is deceptively easy on the eye (an ease that is assisted by Shields all-too-middle-class narrator, but that is the point - Reta didn't expect the world to let her down in the way that it has, pain happens to other people, pain is on the news not here, in my living room, at my dinner party, during Christmas). Unless is the kind of book that feels like streetlevel access to the underground (you're standing on a grill as a train thunders by beneath you, and the grill continues to rattle long after the train has passed): here is a thoughtful novel that lingers in your mind, shaky and insecure as one would be having grappled with big questions (and approached shaky answers, Mr Hornby - See! It can be done!!).

Although there is a gentleness to the telling (in that Shields' narratorial tone is always sensitive to the voice of her characters), Unless is steely in its penetration of life (of a certain kind of life), and resolute in its attempt to understand abstraction.

This book was well-written, but it lacked the lustre of the Stone Diaries or the Republic of Love or Swann, which Shields wrote a number of years ago. The ending of Unless was especially disappointing, as it seemed out of place somehow. If you haven't yet read one of her novels, don't pick this one. The Stone Diaries is a much better novel, with more depth, better characterization and a better plot.

The message that the late Carol Shields seems to convey to Canadian women in this posthumous novel is that they are non-entities unless they discover and answer to those important qualities in their lives that represent the creative, the personal, and the purposeful. While there is a resemblance of a story in this book, "Unless" tends to focus more on the views of a promising Canadian popular authoress as she seeks her spiritual identity and develops her professional mettle in a male-dominated world. In Reta Winters' world, women have traditionally been expected to put the interests of others before their own. On the verge of becoming a writer of a best-seller, "My Thyme is Up", Reta Winters finds herself in the throes of a continuous struggle to redefine herself as a uniquely talented individual. Much of how we see Reta is through her efforts to be fully engaged in developing her main characters, Alicia and Roman, as they mirror her efforts to realize a freed-up life. She forever wants them to live a life that is better than what she and her family are currently living. One of Reta's strengths as a writer is her talent to create a very real tension between who she is actually is and what she wants to become. Her novel becomes the grounds on which she deliberately works out her own lifelong pursuits through the interactions of fictional characters. It isn't just the unique interests of her talented husband Tom that threaten to overshadow Reta's ordinary existence. Other forces like her dysfunctional daughter Norah's decision to drop out of university, her domineering mentor Dr. Westerman's commitment to the feminist cause, and her overbearing New York editor's desire to get her to rewrite her novel conspire to derail Reta's promising writing career. While every effort is being made to turn Reta is somebody she isn't, she is determined to remain in control of her destiny through each succeeding crisis. In the end, the novel remains hers to publish, her daughter recovers her bearings, and she gets to decide where she wants to take her future, as bound up in her novel, without destroying relationships or being prisoner to another's ambitions. "Unless" is a very introspective, philosophical novel that should satisfy those of us who are not always sold on the feminist agenda. This book is a good signature statement of all that Carol Shields has stood for in her writings: the making of the complete woman in modern society.

This is an absolutely astonishing book. UNLESS contains a wonderfully simple story of a family in disarray. The central theme is not unique, the family's college student daughter drops out of school and, with some typically eccentric behavior, tries to drop out of society. The family grieves. Friends and acquaintances offer advice, some good, some bad. Even the family dog is stressed. You've read this story before. But what makes it astonishing is the character development. There is such a sense of recognition for these characters. I felt I've known them all, and want to go on knowing them. Then too, there is a reversal near the end of the book, which I certainly won't reveal, that made me sit back and reevaluate the whole novel. Was I reading a character study, or was I pulled into a mystery novel? The answer to that question is unimportant, in this case. There is also the structure of the novel to consider. The very short chapters whisk the reader along, building a sense of tension. There is a repetition of the primary conflict within each chapter that is compelling. I found myself waiting for the sentence, in each chapter, that would restate the problem. This doesn't get in the way of the story line at all, but compliments it, and in a strange way felt comforting. "Ah, there it is. That's the sentence I was waiting for." There are letters written by the narrator, never mailed, that are humorous, and poignant, and full of outrage over the plight of women in society, in the writing community, in business, in the world at large. At one point, I closed the book, let my head fall back, and broke into laughter. This was when the narrator, who is a writer, contemplates the fact that she is writing about a writer, who is writing about a writer. As the reader, you then add to this mix the knowledge that Ms. Shields in the true writer, writing about a writer, writing about... It becomes a metaphysical experience to the fifth degree. Very clever. This is the first novel I've read by Carol Shields. I intend to read many, many more. Thank you for this simple tale, elegantly told.

A tedious book. I was misled by a favorable review in the Financial Times into buying this thing. Gets two stars only because of the author's prose style which has occasional great flashes of succinct wit and beauty. But the main story is boring, boring, boring and not credible. All the characters are far too passive; they drift along borne by a current of events, making little observations as they drift by. Even an academic would surely react less passively to what happens to a beloved daughter. This attitude is a sure receipe for tedium. This book is also a classic example of why novels about novelists writing a novel should never be written; they just dead-end in a hall of mirrors. This one is better than most of this genre, but still flops. The author's repeated explicit statement that "I know this would be dangerous if I were seriously attempting it" in an effort to ironically detach herself from the trap does not succeed. (Authors: Please don't try this at home.) And a news flash: Moaning for pages and pages and pages about how female authors and characters have been marginalized for centuries does not justify the artistic failure inherent in marginalizing all the male characters in the book, who are poorly-realized cardboard cutouts. Avoid.

Carole writes very well using language that provides clarity and captivates interest but is beyond the vocabulary of the majority of people, possibly not her particulr set of readers, but most. I kept thinking that the plot would begin to unravel and take off on a more vertical plane but that never seemed to happen. The story evolves slowly and eventually resolves itself but only after 320 pages of much of the same. What kept me going was the way she puts words together. She paints a very pretty but dreary picture with copious quantities of fine detail and tangents of loquaciousness. Interesting but in a tedious way.