“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.”
The world of family with its mundane dramas and its ordinary victories is sometimes perceived as the domain of light or lesser fiction. Important literature calls for a broader scope and greater passions than the familial. Minutiae, it seems, is the enemy of literary excellence.
This attitude to literature is particularly irksome to Canadian novelist, Carol Shields. A writer of ten novels and a collection of plays, short stories and poetry anthologies, she has often been relegated to the sunny end of fiction. Her latest, and probably last, novel Unless takes issue with this criticism of miniaturists and particularly the exclusion of women writers from major collections.
Reta Winters, the narrator of Unless, has experienced similar criticisms and is bothered by the marginalising of the female perspective. But giving voice to such irritation is new for Reta. She admits to having a mostly contented life. Living happily with Tom, a loyal and kind doctor with whom she has three healthy daughters, she has a sprawling house an hour out of Toronto. She has also achieved moderate success in her professional life as a writer and translator.
Reta is a woman who believes she has never really experienced sadness. She once thought that ‘saddened people’ – as she called them – suffered bouts of sadness and in between these moments were busy with the ‘useful monotony of happiness’.
Her views have radically changed since her eldest daughter, Norah, has begun living on the streets of Toronto with a sign around her neck and a begging bowl at her feet. The sign bears one word – ‘goodness’.
The family visit her, give her food and money and try desperately to get her home. However Norah seems incapable of even acknowledging their presence.
Reta has no explanation for why her daughter might have dropped out of life in this way. Norah’s father, Tom, believes she must have suffered a terrible trauma but no one has an inkling of what it might be. Reta’s friends and colleagues offer a variety of often conflicting reasons for Norah’s behaviour. Aging feminist scholar Danielle Westerman, whose works Reta has translated, believes it’s part of a broader issue of feminine submission, that Norah “has succumbed to the traditional refuge of women without power: she has accepted in its stead complete powerlessness, total passivity, a kind of impotent piety.”
As a way of coping with her loss, Reta decides to write a second novel. It is to be a sequel to her whimsical book, My Thyme is Up. A light book, a beach book. Something happy to take her mind off being sad.
As Reta seeks to understand her daughter’s malaise, she explores and explains the writing process.
Words are of particular focus in Reta’s ramblings. They’re obviously important to Shields as well. Her prose is spare and elegant. She draws character with deft description. There’s a simplicity to her writing that almost hides its eloquence.
It’s Reta’s digression about words, particularly the prepositions which name each chapter, that provide the only connection to Christianity. In her search to understand goodness, Reta rejects the model of Christ, preferring to look among the grab bag of human traits for wisdom. However there’s insight in her neat linguistic summary of Christianity.
“…the Christian faith is balanced on the words already and not yet. Christ has already come, but he has not yet come. If you can bring the two opposing images together as you would a telescopic viewer … then you will have understood something about the power and metaphysicality of these unsorted yet related words.”
Unless seems almost elusive or filmy but not in a superficial way. Its musing on language and words may seem indulgent, however these fragments are the keys to understanding Shields’ characters. The first-person tone is warm and conversational. It’s almost as if Shields is making Reta’s tale up as she goes. The story ebbs and flows with reflection and contemplation. Yet by the narrative’s conclusion there’s a sense of closure and a realisation that a deliberate structure has undergirded the work from the very beginning.
