Turning Over The Last Page

By Lev Grossman

I knew I wanted her to be a writer," says Carol Shields. "I wanted her to be about 40 years old. I wanted her to live in a certain house. And I wanted something terrible to happen to her."

Perched on an overstuffed armchair that looks like it might swallow her whole, Shields is talking about Reta Winters, the heroine of her new novel, Unless, but she isn't being cruel--or if she is, it's because life itself is cruel. Shields needed something terrible to happen to Reta because something terrible was happening to her. Shields, 66, is dying of breast cancer, and Unless will be her last word.

She almost never wrote her first. The daughter of a factory manager from Oak Park, Ill.--the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, the bard of brawn--the tiny, winsome Shields never imagined she could become a writer at all. "I thought it was like wanting to be a movie star!" she recalls. "I never thought writers could be people like me." Instead, she married Don Shields, an engineer, and moved to Canada, where she had five children in 10 years.

But when her last child marched off to kindergarten, something unexpected happened. "It was very hard to find novels at that time that had anything to do with my life," says Shields. "It was all about leaving your home, leaving your children, not having children. So I started writing the kinds of books that I wanted to read." Her first novel appeared when she was 40. With her eighth she accomplished that rarest of literary feats, a crossover hit: The Stone Diaries was an international best seller and a critical triumph, winning the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Last summer, when she sat down to write Unless, Shields knew what she did not want: a cancer book. Instead, she wrote about Reta, a middle-aged novelist whose daughter Norah has abruptly dropped out of college to panhandle on a Toronto street corner. Norah won't speak; she wears a sign around her neck that reads, simply, GOODNESS. Reta is Shields' not-quite alter ego, and like Shields, she is discovering a realm of pain she never knew existed. "The whole sense of sadness, of the end of things, of the broken vessel--everything is there," says Shields in her quiet, serious voice.

Reta narrates her predicament in the first person, circling it doggedly, chattily, sometimes with a deliciously malicious wit, taking us inside her domestic routines, her comfortable, functional marriage, her kaffeeklatsch, her struggles with her own new book. (Along with everything else, Unless is rich with practical advice for the would-be novelist.) Shields swings easily from comedy to tragedy and back again--she says she doesn't really believe in the distinction anyway--pausing in between for a disquisition on the biology of the trilobite (a prehistoric creepy-crawly), an expert demolition of literary journalists (no offense taken) and an angry letter to a chauvinist academic.

But pain is never far: it's the book's frozen, icy core, and the most vivid moments in Unless demonstrate the oblique, unexpected angles at which agony can enter our lives--as when Reta impulsively scrawls MY HEART IS BROKEN in the ladies' room of a bar, or when she effortlessly encapsulates postholiday gloom with a single question: "Is there any task as joyless as undecorating a tree?" Unless isn't a grand finale to Shields' oeuvre; it's not a monumental summing up. It's a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss. Reta speaks to us in a voice both calm and urgent. This is no time for prevarication, she seems to say. This is the time for truth.

For Shields, time is growing short. Comfortably retired in an ivy-covered mansion in Victoria, British Columbia, she is wrapping up a few last obligations--a preface here, an essay there. She goes antiquing with her daughter, attends a local discussion group, answers e-mail. She tires easily, her face going gray with fatigue (her husband hovers protectively), and she still writes in a sunny upstairs study that used to be a sewing room. She is even considering an excursion into the sonnet. She will write as long as she can. As Reta puts it, "This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it."