- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: PerfectBound; Microsoft Reader edition edition (1 Jun 2002)
- ISBN-10: 0060523697
- ISBN-13: 978-0060523695
- Product Dimensions: 18.5 x 13.2 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,918,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
‘Her perceptions are so quick, her style is so acute, that she can tack a breath to the page and skewer a thought on the wing. It is her speciality to isolate moments that remain distinct in the mind for years, perhaps for a lifetime.’ Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times
‘Shields is about the best we have, she does not just express what oft was thought; she snags the shadows of those thoughts, the thoughts we did not know we had. The effect – at once elating and visceral – feels like a conjurer pulling a handkerchief from your heart.’ Daily Telegraph
Product Description
The dazzling novel from Carol Shields, author of ‘The Stone Diaries’, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and ‘Larry’s Party’, winner of the Orange Prize.
All her life, it seems to Reta Winters, she has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness. She has a loving husband, three bright daughters and supportive friends, and is experiencing growing success as a writer and translator. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning university, family and loving boyfriend to sit on a street corner, uncommunicative but for a sign around her neck bearing one word, ‘Goodness’. The anguish of her loss leads Reta into a desperate search for the causes of her daughter's retreat. No obvious explanation appears to fit. As Reta casts her net ever wider her enquiry turns into an unflinching, often very funny examination of our society and the reasons a young woman might conclude it has no place for her.
Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in this journey through the life of an unforgettable woman. Shields' remarkably supple prose yields insights and images of transcendent beauty and acuity from the stuff of small-town life. At once the discomfiting, ultimately consoling story of one family's loss and a searing portrait of life at the dawn of the twenty-first century, ‘Unless’ is a dazzling and daring novel from the undisputed master of extraordinary fictions about so-called ‘ordinary’ lives.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A mother's agonized attempt to help to her 19-year-old daughter Norah, a drop-out who now begs on a street corner with a sign saying "Goodness" around her neck, provides the framework for Shields's thoughtful and sensitive look at women's roles and the juggling acts they sometimes require. Reta Winters, a successful writer, believes at first that by writing a bright, perky novel about "lost children and goodness and going home," she will be "remaking the untenable world through the nib of a pen." But real life--and Shields's real novel--are, of course, much more complex than that.
Despite the support of her two younger and very caring daughters, her empathetic husband, her friends, and Danielle Westerman, the French feminist whose books she has translated, Kate nevertheless discovers that trying to help a child who will not be helped is a terrible loneliness to bear: "I need to know I'm not alone in what I apprehend, this awful incompleteness that has been alive inside me all this time." Evaluating her life as a wife, writer, friend, mother, and, increasingly, feminist, Kate allows us to share her inner life, both as it is revealed in her writing and as she wrestles with Norah's "hibernation" on the street corner.
Filled with dazzling images (an idea that has "popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn" ; women who have been "sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear"), this Shields novel is more meditative than many of her other novels. "I've been trying to focus my thoughts on the immensity, rather than the particular," Kate/Shields says. As she inspires the reader to share this immensity, she provides insights into the essence of who we are and who we might become. Mary Whipple
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