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When I read THE STONE DIARIES, the 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner and
still Carol Shields's best-known novel, it was like falling in
love. Distracted, I got off at the wrong subway stop. Smitten, I
raved to my friends. Shields, in making an ordinary life
astonishing, seemed to be writing for all women upon whose unsung
existence (at the margins, under the surfaces) the world depends.
Later, reading LARRY'S PARTY, her 1997 anatomy --- literally and
figuratively --- of an obscure and likable guy, I grasped that men,
while equipped with certain advantages, also lurch and stumble
toward self-recognition.

UNLESS, her latest book, is oddly framed. There's the title, for
one thing, as well as some pretty cryptic chapter headings:
"Here's"; "Thus"; "Toward," and so on. When I started reading, I
felt as if the book were a jigsaw puzzle and these were the pieces,
except I had no clue what the Big Picture was. The voice, however,
is immediately absorbing: Ironic, on-to-herself, smart, and drily
humorous (when it isn't anguished). It belongs to a 44-year-old
Canadian writer, Reta Winters, and it takes us through nearly a
year in her life. She has suffered a tragedy --- her daughter
Norah, 19, has fled into madness, spending her nights in a homeless
shelter and her days on a Toronto street corner, with a sign
bearing the word "goodness" around her neck. She isn't dead, but
she is dead to the world.

Only much later do we find out what has prompted Norah's despair;
for now, suffice it to say that Reta is in unbearable pain,
although she is so determined not to fall into self-pity that it is
hard for her to express emotion without editorializing (after she
writes, "My heart is broken" alongside the graffiti in a public
bathroom, she calls it a "whining melodramatic scrawl"). Her sense
of normalcy, of happiness, is irreparably compromised.

When I learned, halfway through reading UNLESS, that Shields has
breast cancer, it was hard not to imagine Reta as an expression of
her creator's own outrage and grief. (Shields herself, in a May 1,
2002, interview on National Public Radio, has said that a different
experience --- hearing that one of her daughters had been hit by a
car --- was decisive.) Diagnosed in 1998, Shields is now at Stage 4
and, according to a profile in the New York Times Magazine
by Maria Russo (April 14, 2002), "she has no dreams of a miracle
recovery." I don't mean to review Shields's illness instead of her
novel. Yet there is an immediacy to UNLESS, a willingness to take
risks, that makes it particularly haunting.

One risk is to make Reta happily married. Shields is rare among
modern novelists in her ability to write persuasively about
marriage, with neither bitterness nor sentimentality, and to
conceive of contentment within it (the Times profile
observes, almost enviously, the tenderness of Shields's own long
union). "We live in each other's shelter; we fit," says Reta of
Tom, her doctor husband. At the same time, the book has an
explicitly feminist perspective (also a chancy thing, the average
reader's distrust of "isms" being what it is). "Because Tom is a
man, because I love him dearly," Reta says, "I haven't told him
what I believe: that the world is split in two, between those who
are handed power at birth...and...all of us who fall into
the...female otherness in which a power to assert ourselves and
claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our
bodies and seal our mouths."

Yes, she does wax rhetorical at times --- but it's not empty
rhetoric, and it feels natural. Reta, one suspects, has always used
words as a way to impose order on her distress. It's yet another
gamble, of course, to make the protagonist a writer. Although
occasionally the choice leads the reader down paths that are a
little too abstract for comfort, for the most part it works,
enabling Shields to fit Reta out with ideas as well as
feelings.

There is, for example, a series of scorching letters to writers who
have omitted women from their supposedly universal equations (this
pattern of exclusion, Reta speculates, is what caused Norah to
retreat in the first place). There is also a chronological list of
Reta's publications, including translations of the works of
85-year-old Holocaust survivor and feminist intellectual Danielle
Westerman (sage, lonely, with little vanities and a big, tough
mind, she's like a cross between Simone de Beauvoir and Elie
Wiesel) and a surprisingly successful venture into light fiction,
My Thyme Is Up (Shields's sardonic nod to her diagnosis?). This
embarrassingly readable book wins the Offenden Prize, which
"recognizes literary quality and honours accessibility" (satirizing
the publishing world is one of Shields's great delights). Its
founders' recipe for enduring fiction: "a beginning, a middle, and
an ending."

UNLESS has all three, but the rise and fall of plot is less
important than the steady hum of everyday activity. The big event
of the book, Norah's "resignation from life," has already happened;
the whole point is what it means to go on when everything has been
changed by an enormous loss.

And the title? Well, the word unless, Shields seems to suggest, is
the essence of what fiction writers do. A hinge between "what is
and what could be," it expresses contingency, possibility. When
horrific events --- breast cancer, an out-of-reach child --- expose
the fragility of human life, unless can reveal "another plane of
being." It holds out hope.

Perhaps it is significant that "Not Yet" is the last chapter in
this strange, honest, profoundly thoughtful book. Perhaps Shields
is saying that this is not the end --- there is more to her story.
Let us hope that she is right.