I just came across this review I wrote a while back – another Pulitzer Prize winner:
THE STONE DIARIES by Carol Shields (1995)
“Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses”
There’s a grace and elegance to Carol Shields’ writing that evokes classic Victorian fiction by female writers such as Jane Austen or George Eliot.
The subject matter too owes much to this British tradition. Like Eliot she is fascinated by un-historic acts and those who live hidden lives. Although her family lineage in this novel is invented, the illusion of reality is fostered through the inclusion of photographs taken from the albums of the characters. The acceptance of this playful deception is acknowledged early in the novel when Shields writes: “The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence”.
These thoughts are supposedly those of the main character, Daisy Stone whose birth in 1905 and death some 90 years later provides the novel’s framework.
The chapter titles indicate the strict linear sequence so that in between chapters one and ten (‘Birth 1905’ and ‘Death’) we have Childhood, Marriage, Love, Work, Sorrow, Ease, Ilness & Decline.
The early chapters are the strongest. The tragic death of Daisy’s mother, Mercy, in childbirth is movingly evoked as is the description of the father, Cuyler, and his solitary attempt to come to terms with this sudden loss. He was not even aware that Mercy was pregnant and the gulf between events and explanations is one of the novels’ recurring themes. The absence of open communication of thoughts and feelings causes Daisy’s second husband, Barker Flett, 12 years her senior, to write wistfully on his deathbed: “Between us we have never mentioned the word love. I have sometimes wondered whether it was the disparity of our ages that made the word seem foolish, or else something stiff and shy in our natures that forbade its utterance”.
These words are read after he has died (“I thought we would have more time”) so there is no sense that he imagined an answer to this mystery would be forthcoming.
Life is depicted in terms of a series of hopes, regrets and losses; the inevitable conclusion of which is cause for reflection but not an excuse for fatalistic acceptance. Even in seemingly uneventful lives there can be a dignity of forbearance and a willingness to embrace change.
The experiences recounted here are primarily from a female perspective and one of Shields’ strengths is that she does not shy away from sex as a primary catalyst for the life choices and the gulf between the myth of the sex act as liberating experience for women in the early part of the 20th century.
A lot of prize winning novels are like Paul Harding’s Tinkers – worthy, philosophical, at times profound but ultimately a bit dull.
I have this on-off plan to have read all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for best fiction. I’ll probably never finish it, but it’s fun all the same. I still have a long way to go. Of the 18 titles since 1994, I have now read 11 of them. Before, going back to 1948 there are big gaps to plug as I’ve only read seven of these. The idea behind this project is to introduce me to books I might not otherwise come across and to prevent me slipping into a pattern of reading only titles by known authors or familiar genres. Of the recent winners only Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are books I’m sure I would have read anyway. Jennifer Egan’s novel is one I had never heard of prior to it being announced as the prize winner in 2011. Reading it has vindicated and revitalised my Pulitzer plan. It is a quite brilliant book. In 1972, there was a corny but cute song by Jim Croce called Time In A Bottle which opened with the verse: “If I could save time in a bottle / The first thing that I’d like to do / Is to save every day / Till eternity passes away / Just to spend them with you”. The sentiment is very sloppy and, of course, entirely impracticable – days can’t last forever and words cannot make wishes come true. This song played in my head while reading Egan’s multifaceted novel because it is one in which each of its many characters experience the effects the relentless march of time has on their lives . In Italy the novel is translated as ‘Il tempo è un bastardo’ . time is a bastard.
