She knows how persuasive optical illusions can be, recalling how witnesses, observing the airplane wheel that hurtled toward the building where her father was living, swore that the object appeared to “float” in the sky, drifting in an almost leisurely manner toward its destination. (“A deus ex machina,” she remembers saying to Tom at the time, and then, reading his baffled face, waved her hands, mumbling, “An act of God, something like that.” Whatever it was, it brought her father to his senses – or so she believes – a violent electric shock, a jolt to his mortality.)
In the days before she married Tom Avery there came to her a vision (a vision whose colors kept fading and threatening to disappear) of how it might feel actually to be a mermaid, adrift in cold sea foam and endlessly circling the confused wreckage of floating timbers and drowned, scattered human bodies, her pale hair painted the same translucent blue as her element.
It seemed to Fay, who judged herself harshly during that disordered period, that the traditional mermaid was her spiritual sister – plaintive, coy, and greedy. Her shimmering frontality, taunting mouth, phosphorescent torso, and thrusting tail – these bodily parts gave off the fishy perfume of ambiguity. Above this salty scene rose a wan yellow moon whose paleness announced a troubling imbalance: the conjoined life and its unscrolled intimacies were weighed against a singular satisfaction, and found wanting – too full of domestic spoilage and cluttered history, too burdened with risk and danger. To love or not to love; it was not a proposition but a subtle threat, although the yield in terms of happiness or sorrow came to the same thing. (She hadn’t counted on the particularity of desir – on Tom’s midnight voice, the remembered covering of flesh across his back – or on how the blessings and admonitions of the bereft – Onion in particular – would drive her beyond her stumbling abstractions.)
“We’ve rethought the situation,” Tom told friends and family in the weeks that followed, and before long this became the official version, as opposed to the unspoken account, based on the careful apportioning of pain. (Love renewed is not precisely love redeemed, and Fay seems less able than Tom to chase that thought away; she is, after all, a woman who sees life in symbolic images, and the image she will never be able to absorb completely is that of herself, an exhausted, desperate, aberrant creature, slumped in Tom’s doorway, pleading for admission.)
The suddenness of the married state, so dense and layered with detail, so thick with contingency, so open to intrusion and minor vibrations, so different from the finished and mannered and well-rehearsed marriages of others, drove her at times, especially in the early years, back to her old habits of solitary Saturday-afternoon walks, and also to lingering on weekdays an extra quarter-hour in her office before turning out the lights for the day. She still has the Leonardo da Vinci quote taped over her desk, “Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom,” and she wonders if these words might apply equally to love.
She loves driving home (she’s bought herself a little Toyota, bright green), and as she moves along in traffic she tunes in to CHOL, and is unfailingly surprised at the buzz of heat that Tom’s voice brings on. She prizes his on-air self, his else and his other – his absence, in fact – and wonders if other people come to depend on this currency of separation.
She observes her parents, who appear to have aligned themselves around something edgy and uncomfortable – she’s not sure what that something is but believes it is more than a fear of being alone. Her father refers (very occasionally) to his “spell of madness,” and her mother, speaking ironically of the same period, uses the word “vacation.” Neither of them has changed noticeably, except that they are getting older, more forgetful, more easily rattled.
They both arrive, a little late and out of breath, for the launching of Fay’s book, Mermaids of the Inner Mind. Tom is there, too, beaming, but with a look of bafflement clouding his face (Fay has come to understand, and to accept, more or less, that he will always be a man who is puzzled by life’s offerings). And Muriel Brewmaster is there, and Clyde and Sonya McLeod, also Bibbi and Jake Greary (whose post-Lithuanian posture is kinder and gentler) and their infant son, Tyler, in a sling around Bibbi’s neck, and Iris and Mac Jaffe, and a rather frail-looking Onion Boyle (to whom Fay’s book is dedicated). About a hundred and fifty others crowd into the brightly lit reception room at the folklore center, where they drink champagne and nibble a variety of small sandwiches and cakes and listen to Fay read a brief passage from Chapter One.
She is on the whole happy with the book, which has followed a surprisingly straightforward Jungian path. The rising of the female figure from the sea, she has concluded, represents the emergence of the anima from the unconscious. This anima is imprinted on the brain, and thus, those who claim to have seen mermaids have indeed done so, since the brain will, when the psyche is in upheaval and poised for change, project the images of the unconscious.
There are twenty chapters of explication, some glorious photographs, and thick, rich webs of footnotes and appendices. The cover (in shiny reds, blues, and greens) shows a mermaid surfacing from a wavy stretch of sea water. Her face is blurred. Her abundant hair gestures toward sexual potential. In one of her hands is a comb, representing love and entanglement.
The other hand, which is uplifted (waving or perhaps beckoning), symbolizes a deep longing for completion, the wish for rapturous union, a hunger for the food of love.
About the Author
CAROL SHIELDS’S novels include Unless, Larry’s Party, winner of the 1998 Orange Prize; The Stone Diaries, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Republic of Love, Happenstance and Mary Swann. Dressing Up for the Carnival, a bestselling collection of short stories, was published in 2000, and a previous collection, Various Miracles, was published in 1994. Born and brought up in Chicago, Carol Shields lived in Canada from 1957 until her death in 2003.
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Praise
Praise for Carol Shields:
‘Carol Shields has always been a beguiling writer … at the root of her fiction, beneath the often well-kempt surfaces of the lives she describes, there is as much unflinching emotional truth as in the books of any of her flashier, more overtly “ambitious” – male – contemporaries’
Observer
‘Carol Shields has explored the mysteries of life with abandon, taking unusual risks along the way … She reminds us why literature matters’
New York Times
‘It is the breadth of Carol Shields’s human sympathy that marks her out as a special writer’
Sunday Telegraph
‘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’
HILARY MANTEL, Sunday Times
CAROL SHIELDS
Larry’s Party
WINNER OF THE 1998 ORANGE PRIZE
In the ordered riotousness of Hampton Court’s maze, Larry Weller discovers the passion of his life. In Larry’s Party, Carol Shields presents an ironic odyssey through the life of a modern man.
‘No more richly satisfying novel, to my knowledge, has been published this year … Shields demonstrates once again her extreme mastery of emotional geometry’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Altogether a cause for celebration’
ANITA BROOKNER, Spectator
‘There is a moving sensation that somehow leaves one grappling for the single word adequate to describe it. Poignant? Touching? Tender? Oh you know, the real thing’
Harpers and Queen
‘This is, like all of Shields’ work, filled with warmth and understanding’
The Times
‘As carefully composed as an orchestral work’
Express
‘A must-read’
Options
‘Clever and beguiling’
PENELOPE LIVELY, Independent
‘An intricately textur
ed, utterly captivating new novel. The brilliant finale will go down as one of the great literary dinner parties, up there with Thackeray, Woolf and Austen’
Good Housekeeping
CAROL SHIELDS
The Stone Diaries
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
This is the story of Daisy Goodwill, from her birth on a kitchen floor in Manitoba, Canada, to her death in a Florida nursing home nearly ninety years later. Her ordinary life is made extraordinary in the telling.
‘I can think of few novels containing so much that is resonant and unforgettable, or that invite the reader to participate so fully and rewardingly. The Stone Diaries is a triumphant and important book and deserves a wide audience’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Rapturous, sensitive and funny’
Guardian
‘The best novel we are likely to see this year’
Independent
‘If this does not win the Booker Prize for Fiction it will be because it is too good’
Scotland on Sunday
‘A novel of an altogether superior kind’
ANITA BROOKNER
CAROL SHIELDS
Mary Swann
‘Deft, funny, poignant, surprising, and beautifully shaped – in total command of itself and its language’
MARGARET ATWOOD
Mary Swann, a latter-day Emily Dickinson, submitted a paper bag full of poems to newspaper editor Frederick Cruzzi mere hours before her husband hacked her to pieces. Works of genius can come from extraordinary places. A feminist scholar, a librarian, a biographer and a publisher all try to piece together the story behind her life and work in this teasing, inventive and beautiful novel.
‘Ingenious and inventive, strikingly evocative of place, of character, of the world of things, capable of both comedy and tenderness, and above all beautifully written’
London Review of Books
‘Written with elaborate grace’
Financial Times
CAROL SHIELDS
The Box Garden
‘Carol Shields sings with the charm of a true siren. In her hands, we believe anything can happen’
Guardian
Charleen Forrest’s husband has left her. Gone not only from her life, but apparently from the face of the earth. Charleen is left with his name and their marvellously uncomplicated son, Seth. She also has a fair talent for poetry, and a job on the National Botanical Journal which brings her in touch with the mysterious Brother Adam … a man with a contagious passion for silence and grass.
Charleen’s piercing gifts of observation are wonderfully balanced with her intermittent bouts of all-too-familiar feelings of incompetence that are as poignantly observed as her gifts for love and survival.
CAROL SHIELDS
Unless
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2002 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
‘Shields writes like an angel, awesome in the intelligence of her observations and never less than elegant in expressing them’
DAVID ROBSON, Sunday Telegraph
Reta Winters has a loving family, good friends, and growing success as a writer of light fiction. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world, abandoning univeristy to sit on a street corner, wearing a sign that reads only ‘goodness’. As Reta seeks the causes of her daughter’s retreat, her enquiry turns into an unflinching, often very funny meditation on society and where we find meaning and hope. Unless is a dazzling and daring novel from the undisputed master of extraordinary fictions about so-called ‘ordinary’ lives.
‘It takes the vessel of fiction in its hands and hurls it to the floor … a masterpiece’
RACHEL CUSK, New Statesman
‘As poised and wise a novel as any you will read this year’
TIM ADAMS, Observer
‘Our most intelligent and beguiling observer … Unless is her most raw and intentful novel yet’
PENNY PERRICK, Sunday Times
CAROL SHIELDS & BLANCHE HOWARD
A Celibate Season
In an original collaboration two award-winning authors, Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, have written an immensely enjoyable novel which gives us both sides of a story about the breakdown of traditional roles, rules and communication in a marriage.
A Celibate Season is the story of a married couple, Jocelyn and Charles (Jock and Chas), and their self-imposed separation of ten months when Jock accepts a job in a city more than three thousand miles away from her family.
Suddenly single again, Jock is confronted with local politics, loneliness and advances from the opposite sex. Meanwhile back at home, Chas, an unemployed architect, is now a single parent who has to reacquaint himself with his teenage children, Mia and Greg, learn to run a household and shift his career priorities. Throw in an attractive young housekeeper, a mother-in-law who enjoys her wine, a touch of teenage angst, some unexpected home renovations and a disastrous Christmas dinner and you have modern family life.
CAROL SHIELDS
Dressing Up for the Carnival
In these stories, Carol Shields brings together the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that won so many readers to novels such as The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party.
In the title story, with which the collection opens, Carol Shields paints with economy and wit the morning thoughts of a disparate selection of people as they embark upon the ‘cycles of consolation and enhancement’ that they find to sustain them through the day.
There are stories about how human beings find ways to survive loss, disappointment and loneliness; and stories that centre on long-married couples, often comically mismatched, like the nudist in ‘Dressing Down’ whose wife is so keen on covering things up that she even sews a cover for her washing machine. Shields slyly reveals the strength of unarticulated bonds, and honours the possibility of regeneration and romance.
The Work of Carol Shields
POETRY
Others
Intersect
Coming to Canada
NOVELS
Larry’s Party
The Stone Diaries
The Republic of Love
A Celibate Season (with Blanche Howard)
Mary Swann
A Fairly Conventional Woman
Happenstance
The Box Garden
Small Ceremonies
Unless
STORY COLLECTIONS
Dressing Up for the Carnival
The Orange Fish
Various Miracles
The Collected Stories
PLAYS
Departures and Arrivals
Thirteen Hands
Fashion, Power, Guilt and the Charity of Families
(with Catherine Shields)
Anniversary (with David Williamson)
CRITICISM
Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision
ANTHOLOGY
Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told
(Edited with Marjorie Anderson)
Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren’t Told
(Edited with Marjorie Anderson)
BIOGRAPHY
Jane Austen: A Penguin Lives Biography
Copyright
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublisher
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Hammersmith
London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in paperback in 1993 by Fourth Estate
First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Fourth Estate
Copyright © Carol Shields 1992
Carol Shields asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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EPub Edition © November 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-38564-5
HARPER PERENNIAL
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