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Summary: UNLESS just might make you think. . .
Review: It's funny. I read some of the other reviews of Carol Shields' novel UNLESS and wondered what on earth they were talking about. Maybe that's another review though, and one which has no purpose in this medium. This is what I "got" from UNLESS and it just seems so different from what some of the other reviewers got. Women are still treated as inferiors in this world and because of that Reta's oldest daughter Norah is now sitting on a Toronto street corner with a sign around her neck. Women are not recognized for their worth. This is what I hear Carol Shields telling us. Or was that Reta Winters? Whoever. I heard it and it's so true. I had lunch today with the father of a friend who twice called me, "My dear," in a tone so condescending that if he weren't my friend's father, I would have left and never had another conversation with him. Why does he talk down to me? Because he fails to value women. Why does he fail to value women? I'm not sure. Do all men think this way? Absolutely not. But the majority of society does, has, and will continue to do so. Norah's statement of goodness, the sign she wears around her neck as she sits on her corner day after day after day, is not meant to change the world but to change her feelings that the world isn't good and especially isn't good to women. There will be many detractors of this belief, but most of them will be men or people living on another planet. Perhaps I've oversimplified this but I could probably write a thesis on much of what I'm hearing and thinking because of reading this novel. This is an important book in many ways and one you need to read with your eyes and your mind wide open. I am saying all of this because Carol Shields' book made me think about this. This isn't a story without a plot as one review said. The plot is there for all of us to see if we're just willing to look.
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Summary: I can't stop thinking about this book...
Review: If it were possible, I wish Carol Shields could get TWO Pullitzers for this book. I absolutely thought it was beautiful. Spare. Inviting. Well-considered. Private. Intellectual. Furious. Sad. Honest. Quiet. Brave. All this and a feminist book to boot. I just finished reading Kavalier & Clay, another Pullitzer Prize winning book before I read this, and it was such a contrast in style. I understand why K&C won the Pullitzer, because it was so painstakingly redsearched and elaborately embroidered. Unless is the opposite. It's austere and personal. Ultimately, for me it became a book that really engaged me and that I wanted to get back to every day. I miss it now that it's done. Carol Shields is my hero. Let's all keep her in our thoughts and prayers as she battles breast cancer.
Rating: 
Summary: It is a good book, just a hair shy of being great.
Review: I don't mind the fact that the book didn't have a plot. If you think you can enjoy a character study, then you too might enjoy the book. However, you should be aware that the book will stall in a couple of places (but never more than for a few pages) and there will be some minor annoyances when Shields challenges your suspension of disbelief and makes you very aware that you are just reading a book. Not everyone is forgiving when it comes to art. So, in addition to being able to enjoy a character study, you will also need to be able to forgive some of the author's transgressions.
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Summary: Midlife crises averted
Review: Reta with 3 teenage daughters, one who checked out and is sitting on a street corner in Toronto, a husband by agreement and father of the children has reached a point in life where there are more questions than answers. She doubts the meaning of her entire life, it's importance and relevance to actually anything. This introspection is triggered when her oldest and brightest child Norah drops out of the University, leaves her long-term boyfriend and daily sits on a street corner in Toronto with a sign hung around her neck stating "Goodness." This introspection and magnifying glass look into her own past and her present life is a moving description of a woman looking for meaning in her life where there may be none. There may be none for anyone. It just is and therefore, thus, hence, etc. Enjoyed. I've asked many of the questions myself over the course of my life. Sometimes there are no answers. jacque stiles
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Summary: Pretentious Drivel
Review: After hearing a favorable review of the book on talk radio, I added it to my summer reading list and picked it up at the library. While the author can write well, her attempts at being philosophical are just that - attempts. The main character spends too much time talking about herself as a writer which comes across as conceit on the author's part. The reasoning behind the daughter's living on the street is sort of just shoved into the plot and doesn't invoke emotion. Actually, none of the characters make the reader feel for them. It was a painful read, not recommended unless you are easily fooled by the foolish.
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Summary: A Profound Novel under a Cloak of Simplicity
Review: Carol Shields is a powerful writer, all the more so because she writes in such facile prose that she is accessible on every level - the "story" of a Canadian family coping with focus of despair in an otherwise comfortable world, the "philosophy" of how we arrive at the state of adulthood only when we are able to remember and incorporate our hazy past, the "sociology" of what is happening to feminisim, to friendships, to geneology and inheritance in a family, the "spiritual" haven where finding internal goodness is more than enough of a Journey, the "didactical" means of writing a book. Now that covers a lot of ground! Shields builds the tension of this short novel with such honesty that we are at first put off that a good mother could seem to put the trauma of her eldest daughter becoming a street person in such a niche that she can proceed with cooking, tending her hausband and other daughters, having tea with friends, translating from the French the works of a Canadian femininist, and writing her own "light entertainment " novel while being confronted by editorial asides. It is just such a slice of ordinary life, living day to day because of and inspite of, that makes her final resolution of this marvelous novel so touching. Shields assigns each short chapter with "little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define" such as "therefore, otherwise, instead, already," etc. Most tellingly she uses one of these 'chips' as the title of this novel, and it is only half way through that she tells us why. " 'Unless' is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence." To attempt to review this novel with more words would be inadequate. This is the work of a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, one of the strongest, and most honest voices writing today. This is a treasure box of a book. Highly recommended.
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Summary: If you don't have another book better to read
Review: The prose is indeed beautiful as the author has demonstrated before, however this book does not have a compelling story. Yes it may be written well, but seems a bit too self involved and unchallenging. I could never care enough for the characters to feel hooked on this book
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Summary: Ordinary Suffering Made Extraordinary
Review: Reta Winters, 44, has led a charmed life. She is a well received translator and writer with a doctor husband and three great girls. Then one daughter withdraws, sits mute on the streets of Toronto, her only communication a sign she holds that says GOODNESS. Reta takes a journey of introspection in which she contemplates what she, and ultimately her daughter, has lost. Her suspicion is that our society still lacks awareness of women's lesser power. Her daughter, like all of us, is expected to seek goodness, but never greatness.
Carol Shields follows the arc of Reta's despair, sometimes with great wit and irony. Reta carries on with ordinary life even in the face of loss. A wonderful chapter begins, "Tom and I still have sex--have I mentioned this?--even though our oldest daughter is living on the street." She starts another chapter with having manure delivered for the garden--even though her daughter is on the street. Reta finds respite in the fictional world she creates in her new novel and the characters' lives begin to parallel Reta' life which begin to parallel Carol Shield's life--all tied up in losses and ultimately healing. It's easy to forgive Shields if the ending is a little too neatly tied up. She is struggling with breast cancer and probably knows more about loss and redemption than she would like to.
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Summary: Greatness , Irony, Writing, Philosophy
Review: I fully agree with Diane Cramer's customer review. To which I'll add that Shields makes many clever moves here--"Unless" is a great book about writing, about the impulse towards fiction, the necessity of writing, its healing aspects, the nuts and bolts. Her feminist rants struck me as full of Irony especially as she is Wrong about the imagined feminist dilemma of the traumatized daughter, and with Reta's famed French mentor, the reining Canadian feminist who, as the world turns, has been traumatized by her own mother. So, the rage against male-domination is layered here, as is almost everything Shields touches. At one point she has the mother/author Reta dismissing all politics, yet it is a political event that is pivotal, if swiftly handled in "Unless". I disagree with those who say this book is feminine in any traditional sense. Shields is able to "do" philosophy beautifully. Philosophy as it intersects especially with language--those Chapter headings are meditations on words that turn lives, are alluring. She is a philosopher And a story teller, showing the strange way that thought and events can converge and/or diverge. She does this so naturally, like no one else I've ever read. As for the repeated theme of "goodness," that is also handled ironically, especially as Cramer has written, she achieves greatness here. A multi-dimensional book. No easy way to categorize it, in my opinion. Its plot shows the juxtapostions of living a life vs meditating and thinking on that life. Which is after all, true for all of us, conscious or not. There are continual shocks of self-recognition here. Nothing simplistic or purely domestic at all. And now I'm off to read the rest of her ouvre, which I've not yet done.
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Summary: How to be Good
Review: If I was lazy I'd tell you that this is the book that Nick Hornby's How to be Good could have been (if Nick Hornby was even a fifth of the writer that Carol Shields is). Or I could say that this is a twenty-first century reinterpretation of When She Was Good, one of Philip Roth's earlier masterpieces. Unfortunately, such laziness would do this rather wonderful and thought-provoking book a grave disservice - in that, although goodness - the idea of goodness, what it means to be good - is at the centre of this book, it shares that space with ruminations on the art of writing, and what it is to be a woman (and a woman writer, and a wife, and a mother, and a friend, and a person in the world) at the beginning of what we like to regard as a more enlightened time to be alive. Reta Winters took her husband Tom's surname when they first got together (part of the reason being that she was originally Reta Summers and they both agreed that one of the seasons had to change). In lots of ways, this information (which is almost the opposite of a revelation, whatever the word for that is) contains the genesis of this novel writ small. They have three daughters together, Reta and Tom, the oldest of whom decides on the cusp of her nineteenth birthday to throw up her studies and live on the street with a simple cardboard sign - on which the word GOODNESS is written - on a string around her neck. Reta has no idea why her daughter has chosen this path and that - the abstract decision to withdraw from the life you are expected to live - throws the world out of kilter. To all intents and purposes life continues on as it did before (Reta and Tom still sleep together, Reta continues to write the sequel to her comic novel, the family entertain at Christmas). Beneath the surface, however, and within Reta, you realise that the world these characters inhabit has come to resemble nothing so much as the scab that forms over damaged skin. The title of the book, and each of the chapter titles that follow, are made up of what Shields calls "little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs and prepositions) . . . words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already and not yet." These words act as the "odd pieces of language" that cement the isolated events in a person's life to form "a coherent narrative." The adverbs and the prepositions, the words you do not notice, commingle with Reta's attempts to rebuke the various men in positions of authority who continually overlook the debt history owes to women (believing in part that her daughter's complaint has been brought on as a direct result of NOT BEING HEARD - which, in a way, as the climax reveals, is the case). There is grit here and pain (that all too human attempt to comprehend that which is beyond comprehension: the actions of others), and the writing is deceptively easy on the eye (an ease that is assisted by Shields all-too-middle-class narrator, but that is the point - Reta didn't expect the world to let her down in the way that it has, pain happens to other people, pain is on the news not here, in my living room, at my dinner party, during Christmas). Unless is the kind of book that feels like streetlevel access to the underground (you're standing on a grill as a train thunders by beneath you, and the grill continues to rattle long after the train has passed): here is a thoughtful novel that lingers in your mind, shaky and insecure as one would be having grappled with big questions (and approached shaky answers, Mr Hornby - See! It can be done!!). Although there is a gentleness to the telling (in that Shields' narratorial tone is always sensitive to the voice of her characters), Unless is steely in its penetration of life (of a certain kind of life), and resolute in its attempt to understand abstraction.
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