UNLESS - A BOOK REVIEW

Carol Shields was the kind of writer whose books evoke two responses. On publication there is the standard fancy dance of obeisance as the critics bow and scrape before the Great Intellect, falling over each other to say how profound, how brave, how clever it is – and then another response two years later when the same critics preface their next review with a line like “After the disappointment of her last novel…” How often must readers see such a line and heave a secret sigh of relief, free at last to admit that they couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, and actually found the book as dull as dishwater?

Well, there isn’t much dishwater in Unless. Reta Winters is a middle-aged novelist and translator living in a nice bland town in a nice bland country – Canada, as it happens. She’s married to a doctor. (How aspirational is that?) and nothing so messy as dishwater is allowed to rear its ugly head. And then suddenly nineteen-year-old daughter Nora decides to sit on the pavement begging with a sign round her neck saying “Goodness.”

Unless promises to tell the story of a happy life interrupted by sudden sorrow. Perhaps it even means to show that unhappiness is inevitable and cannot be sealed off by wrapping oneself in the trappings of bourgeois life. The problem is that the life isn’t interrupted. Pages pass, whole chapters pass, and not only has the story not started but we haven’t even met the wretched girl who is the cause of all this misery. And what is Reta Winters doing while all this is going on? Gazing at her own navel, mainly. She talks about her career. She does lunch in the Orange Blossom tea-rooms. We’re taken on a tour of her house. She spends another chapter going in and out of boutiques trying to buy a scarf. Not that the chapter is called ‘Reta Goes In And Out of Shops Trying To Buy A Scarf.’ Good lord, no – that might give the game away. Instead, it’s called something like… well, ‘Instead,’ actually. All the chapters have cryptic titles: ‘So’ ‘Otherwise’ – all suggestive of hidden depths.

Fictional characters are under no obligation to behave well, but they are under an obligation to behave plausibly, especially if they happen to be in a novel with literary pretensions. The fact is that Reta’s inactivity just doesn’t ring true. There are half-wits in the audience of daytime confession shows every morning of the week who could tell you what a real mother would do in her situation. She’d get out there, she’d be on the phone, she’d talk to her daughter’s friends, she’d blame her daughter’s boyfriend, she’d run the gamut of emotions. She’d do something. Reta not only does nothing, she feels nothing. She says she feels pain, but it’s a sanitized version that is hard to believe in When her husband withdraws into his hobby of trilobite research, she more or less says, Ho hum. Fair enough. She calmly listens to her friend the aged feminist grandee come out with rubbish like “the tyranny of penetration” without batting an eye. When we are in pain and another person tries to trump our pain with something that is clearly not in the same league, we get angry. From Reta we get nothing.

Only in literary fiction is such cavalier disregard for the need to tell a story enshrined and encouraged. In film and television, there would be squadrons of editors and co-writers drafted in to make sure something happened. The final result might still be a dog’s dinner, but it would be a dog’s dinner served up by people who were at least trying to meet their audience halfway.

The prose is beautiful, full of sentences that seem to be reaching out to a second life as stand-alone epigrams, such as you see in reviews or at the beginnings of other novels, but without the solidity of plot or engaging character, the effect is all silk cushions and no settee, all picture and no wall.

At one point, Winters/Shields upbraids an ageing literary lion for not mentioning any women in his list of great writers. It’s a fair point, but if what she really means is, “like me, for instance” then I’m with the literary lion.