Carol Shields’ body of work focus on themes of everyday life, identity and things that people hide from the general public. Her characters are genuine and her prose is beautiful in its exactness. For these reasons, Carol Shields is my favorite novelist.
Shields works include eight novels, two collections of short stories, three books of poetry, one play and one biography. Most of them explore the themes of how people relate to each other and appear to themselves. Identity, both mistaken identity and how an individual views him or herself, also play a part in her work. Both of these themes work well with the plots, which are usually about domestic and family life, and are never forced or contrived. She simply tells the story of common people as they act and react to uncommon events in their lives.
One of her novels, The Stone Diaries, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. This novel uses several different narrative forms, such as first person account, third person account, diary entries, letters and lists, to tell the life story of Daisy Stone Goodwill. It’s wonderful for the creativity of expression and for Daisy’s search to find the point of her life. Finding meaning and a purpose to life is always relevant, but more so in our current time of economic struggle and social media that encourages screen to screen rather than face to face interaction.
Shield’s last novel, Unless, is the story of a happy family broken when one daughter drops out of college to sit begging on the street with a sign bearing the word “goodness” around her neck. While the daughter’s motives are found and the family heals, it’s a great exploration of loss and of where we find meaning in life. The mother confronts grief and how to grieve while maintaining a normal life for the rest of her family. Ultimately, she finds balance in life, and a gravity to all of the small events of her life.
In my favorite novel, Small Ceremonies, one woman struggles to define herself while uncovering secrets about her friends. Judith is a wife and mother of two who writes biographies. Over the course of one year, she not only experiences a shift of feeling in her marriage and of independence on the part of her children, she unravels a case of mistaken identity about one of her novelist friends. It’s my favorite of her novels because of the way she writes about ordinary events that have the potential to be life-changing.