Unless: A Novel (P.S.)

by Carol Shields

Unless: A Novel (P.S.)

book data

938 ratings, 3.55 average rating, 152 reviews (more data...)

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published

January 1st 2006 (first published 2002) by Harper Perennial

binding

Paperback, 352 pages

literary awards

2003 Orange Prize Shortlist

isbn

0060874406 (isbn13: 9780060874407)

description

Forty-four-year-old Reta Winters, wife, mother, writer, and translator, is living a happy life until one of her three daughters drops out of unive...more

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1316)

All ratings | 5 stars (183) | 4 stars (324) | 3 stars (271) | 2 stars (107) | 1 star (38) | avg 3.55

all | this edition

Pierce

Pierce rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

12/03/07

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: Women, I guess.

Kind of self indulgent, maybe? I don't know. People keep telling me it was all about the mother's flustering about with tangental stuff to ignore the problem of her daughter, but if you write a novel about not dealing with something then what people are actually reading is whatever the distraction is, here: Feminism.

And then we find out about the daughter at the end and suddenly it all seems, like: What the fuck was that about? Why did I have to read so many descriptions of your house furnis...more

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Chelsie

Chelsie rated it:

05/27/08

Read in May, 2008

I absolutely love Carol Shields use of irregular words in this book(by irregular I mean unconventional). This book took me longer to read than most because I found myself constantly intrigued by the words she was using and made me feel the need to keep looking them on in the dictionary. Although this book is not typically my style of book, I did find it well thought out and interesting. I loved that Carol Shields made her character, Reta Winters a writer, as so vastly explores the life inside a ...more

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Cynthia

Cynthia rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

01/02/08

Read in January, 2004

I was so bored reading this book. It started out boring in the first chapter when she listed all of her works and explained her translations. I'm not one of those type of readers where a book has to immediately grip you in the beginning otherwise you quit. So I kept on reading hoping it would get better... but it didn't.

The book focuses on how Reta deals with her daugher, Norah's, strange decision to live in a shelter and to beg on the streets. Reta starts to believe the reason why Norah be...more

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Carolyn

Carolyn rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

07/30/08

Read in July, 2008

this was the worst book ever. i thought the premise was interesting (the back cover describes a story of a mother who's eldest daughter gives up her college life to live on a street corner wearing a sign that says 'goodness'). the daughter is barely mentioned, however the mother goes into nauseating, never-ending whining about her writing career/lack of writing career.... it's horrid. i kept waiting for her to go into more detail about the daughter, but it never happened. needless to say, i gave...more

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Emily

Emily rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

11/25/08

bookshelves: 2008-journey-to-30, funky-fiction, i-own-it

Read in November, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

What happens when you lose control of a situation?? What happens when your child slips into psychosis?? The novel Unless by Carol Shields tells a story of what happens. Reta Winters is a suburban Toronto mom with three daughters and a husband obsessed with trilobites. One spring day, her oldest daughter Norah slips for an unknown reason. She drops out of college, moves to a hostel, and begins a life of sitting on a Toronto street corner with a sign that simply says “Goodness”. W...more

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Catherine

Catherine rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

11/24/08

Read in November, 2008

I was initially offended by the description of Sheilds as a "gentle feminist." This double-edged sword of a description seemed an attempt at making a dirty word like "feminist" more palatable to the general public. The feminist in me roared, "Why must a woman still be described as 'gentle'?!"

Upon reflection, though, I have realized that Sheilds truly is a gentle feminist, in the best way possible. While the ultimate quest in this story is the protagonist's daugh...more

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Stephanie

Stephanie rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

11/09/08

Read in November, 2008

Has it ever happened to you that every diverse piece of writing you read and every conversation you have with your friends seem to converge and coalesce at once in one novel -- a novel that explains and illuminates what ever else you've been reading and thinking?

I had this experience reading Unless (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), by Carol Shields (winner, among other prizes, of both the Pulitzer and the Orange). I had been reading in the Atlantic an article about the diffe...more Has it ever happened to you that every diverse piece of writing you read and every conversation you have with your friends seem to converge and coalesce at once in one novel -- a novel that explains and illuminates what ever else you've been reading and thinking?

I had this experience reading Unless (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), by Carol Shields (winner, among other prizes, of both the Pulitzer and the Orange). I had been reading in the Atlantic an article about the different selves that inhabit our bodies, conversations between which and with other -- imaginary friends and selves -- are far from being evidence of mental illness but rather the simple, everyday course of thinking and experiencing that we all will admit to if pressed. And I chuckled as I read that because I had myself been having many imaginary conversations with Michelle Obama, where I told her how much I admired her and her husband and how very much I wanted them in the White House. And then there was my friend's entry in her blog where she -- ardent Democrat -- spoke about how she was so disappointed in the country's celebration of Obama's victory with our attendant failure to recognize our continuing exclusion of women from the highest office(s) in the land for what it was.

All these readings and conversations came together for me when I was reading Unless, the story of a smart, capable and accomplished woman, a writer, who uses her own multitude of selves and their imaginary conversations with male keepers of the canon as a means to try and understand and diagnose her eldest daughter's descent into mental illness. She grounds -- and partially misdiagnoses (but only partially, the reader is led to understand) -- her daughter's illness in the experience of smart, capable women who see themselves unconsciously excluded from all realms of power by smart, capable men who ought to view them and credit them as peers.

Besides being thought-provoking, the novel was beautifully written and engaging, with interesting characters and wry flashes of humor.
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Philip

Philip rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

09/19/08

Unless by Carol Shields has been my third novel in a row written from the perspective of a self-analytical, self-critical and perhaps self-obsessed female narrator, the other being by Margaret Drabble and Anne Enright. Maybe Carol Shields drew the short straw, because I felt that Reta, the writer-narrator of Unless, internalised everything, so much so, in fact, that the other characters in the book became no more than projections of themselves within her. Maybe that was part of the point.

Ost...more Unless by Carol Shields has been my third novel in a row written from the perspective of a self-analytical, self-critical and perhaps self-obsessed female narrator, the other being by Margaret Drabble and Anne Enright. Maybe Carol Shields drew the short straw, because I felt that Reta, the writer-narrator of Unless, internalised everything, so much so, in fact, that the other characters in the book became no more than projections of themselves within her. Maybe that was part of the point.

Ostensibly about a family of ordinary people, Unless portrays Reta Winters, her partner Tom and their three daughters. They live an hour from Toronto in a home that sounds as big as a village. Reta can’t decide how many rooms there are, or even what might constitute a room. Tom’s a medic and Reta is a published author of moderate success. Not, at least for me, run-of-the-mill ordinary folk.

The eldest daughter, Norah, a nineteen year old determined to make her own marks, has recently left home to live with a boyfriend. She has dropped out of college and then she suddenly took to sleeping rough, occasionally in a hostel for the homeless, whilst, during the day sitting on a street corner behind a sign saying, “Goodness”. Reta can’t rationalise her daughter’s apparent rejection of everything she was supposed to be and begins to delve into her own psyche for clues. It affects her work, her family life and her relationships, all of which must, of course, go on.

Throughout, the narrative is both clear and crisp. Reta’s character is credible, if a little prone to a lack of self-awareness, despite the fact that she seems to have majored in the topic to the extent that her self-preoccupation verges on the obsessive. Her writing progresses, but for me unconvincingly. A light read, something twixt romance and general fiction, is what she is looking for. Quite why the main character needs to be an Albanian trombonist (good at sex, apparently, because of the regular arm-pumping) only Carol Shields knows. There were comic opportunities that were never taken and, equally, possibilities for parallel lives that were never exploited. Personally, I found the scenario of the novel within the novel, as explained by Reta, herself, the writer, offered neither comic relief nor insight. When Reta’s new editor demands that the light fiction be transformed into the literary by means of, amongst other things, redrawing the last chapter to introduce surprise and enigma, undertones, unexpected depth, we are led directly into the unexpected discovery of the reason behind the unexplained behaviour of Reta’s daughter, the events that prompted her drop-out into apparent depression. It ought to have been a poignant moment, but for me it all became a bit pedestrian.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, by the way. My criticisms are technical at best and petty at worst, but I fell I have to record them. Perhaps it was attempting three psyche-analysing, internally-bound first persons on the trot that got to me. Perhaps I too got lost inside myself as I read. Carol Shields’s “I” was a darned sight more balanced and self-sufficient than either Drabble’s or Enright’s. Perhaps if Reta had made a bit more fuss I would have found her more credible. But that, undoubtedly, was her strength.
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Choupette White

Choupette rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

11/23/08

bookshelves: 1001-books, amazing-writing, i-wish-i-own, literary-fiction, to-be-re-read

Read in June, 2008

Unless is really quite good. And I really mean quite good, not brilliant, not bad, but quite good. It's quiet and peaceful and pretty and enjoyable without being mindblowing or brilliant. There are many beautiful moments in it, and the language is really nice. I enjoyed it for its subtlety. In fact, it's so subtle that it's difficult to work out why it works as well as it does. Maybe I'll just let the text do the talking.

"I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being ...more Unless is really quite good. And I really mean quite good, not brilliant, not bad, but quite good. It's quiet and peaceful and pretty and enjoyable without being mindblowing or brilliant. There are many beautiful moments in it, and the language is really nice. I enjoyed it for its subtlety. In fact, it's so subtle that it's difficult to work out why it works as well as it does. Maybe I'll just let the text do the talking.

"I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I've had a look, and there's nothing down that road. I wouldn't reply, as Anna Karenina does when asked what she's thinking about: "Always about my happiness and my unhappiness." The nakedness of that line of thought leads to a void. No, Ms. Winters of Orangetown much prefers the more calculated protocols of dodging sadness with deliberate manoeuvres. She has an instinct for missing the call of grief. Scouring the separate degrees of innerness makes her shy. A reviewer... charged...me with being "good" at happy moments but inept at the lower end of the keyboard. Well, now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabric, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep? Whimpering."

I picked this paragraph pretty much at random from among the pages I marked as having standout passages, and it's an excellent example of Shields' portrayal of the protagonist (Reta Winters) and her struggle to cope with her daughter Norah's withdrawal from society. One day, for no reason that her family can understand, Norah leaves her steady boyfriend and seemingly happy life as a student at the University of Toronto to take up a position on the footpath, begging for alms and wearing a cardboard sign with the word "goodness" written on it around her neck. Reta Winters is a translator and writer of 'light' fiction; Unless charts the parallel journeys of the protagonist (Reta) and of the protagonist of Reta's book (Alicia?) until both reach their respective conclusions. In the sort of trick that some might call silly, naff or cheap but that makes a linguophile like myself want to squee, Unless embodies the uncertainty and conditionality encoded of the sense and connotations of the word 'unless'.

Thanks to its subject matter, this book immediately reminded me of Phillip Roth's American Pastoral (both are about a daughter performing an act that is shocking and seems completely out of character and her family's attempts to deal with it), and I originally wanted to write a comparison of the two, but I'll admit that it's been too long since I read American Pastoral and that I also just can't be bothered. In brief, though: for all the similarity of the plots (?), the two are very different. American Pastoral is "raging and elegiac" in the wonderful words of the reviewer who is quoted on the cover of my edition - it is anger, a cry of despair and why?? that echoes in my head even now. Unless is totally different. It is quieter and more restful, but no less meaningful and potentially heart-wrenching. Read them both for an interesting comparison.

But then, I went back a few weeks later and found it beautiful. Not 'quite good', but excellent....less

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Krenzel

Krenzel rated it:

(review of isbn 0007137702)

08/01/08

bookshelves: 1001

Read in July, 2008

According to Peter Boxall’s "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," "Unless," by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Carol Shields, is a seminal work worthy of being included in the "canon" – at least, according to the first edition of that guide (according to the second edition, published this year, we can now safely die without reading "Unless"). Interestingly, while Carol Shields is (to a limited extent) included in the "canon," one of the...more According to Peter Boxall’s "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," "Unless," by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Carol Shields, is a seminal work worthy of being included in the "canon" – at least, according to the first edition of that guide (according to the second edition, published this year, we can now safely die without reading "Unless"). Interestingly, while Carol Shields is (to a limited extent) included in the "canon," one of the major questions she asks in "Unless" is why women are so often excluded. In "Unless," the protagonist, 44-year-old writer, Reta Winters deals with the plight of her 19-year-old daughter, who has given up her life to sit on a street corner, by distracting herself with work on a "light novel." Her friend, Danielle Westerman, a famous author in her own right, believes that Reta is wasting her time writing frivolous novels, but for all of her serious work, Westerman is nevertheless excluded from the "canon," prompting Reta to wonder, "How does she bear it? All the words she’s written, all the years buried inside her. What does her shelf of books amount to, what force have these books on the world?" What, she wonders, is the purpose of writing, especially for women, when their work is so easily dismissed? Although Reta believes that women writers are excluded from the greatness accorded the "canon," ultimately she finds a purpose to her writing because of the personal joy it gives her and the voice it gives to women.

One of the major themes explored in "Unless" is the issue of how women are allowed "[g:]oodness but not greatness," in the words of Danielle Westerman, a feminist pioneer and Holocaust survivor whose memoirs Reta has translated. Westerman believes that Reta’s daughter has dropped out of life to sit on a street corner, wearing a "GOODNESS" sign around her neck, because she "has simply succumbed to the traditional refuge of women without power: she has accepted in its stead complete powerlessness, total passivity, a kind of impotent piety." In a series of unsent letters to various men who have excluded women from, among other things, a list of the Great Minds of the Western Intellectual world, a list of problem solvers, and a list of great writers, Reta expresses her outrage with "how casually and completely [women are:] shut out of the universe," agreeing with Westerman that Norah has escaped from life after realizing she has no possibility for greatness. Like Westerman and her daughter, Reta has been allowed goodness, but not greatness. Although her first novel, "My Thyme Is Up," sold well, it was not taken seriously as a work of art. According to a review in the "New Yorker," her book "is very much for the moment, though certainly not for the ages." Writing the sequel, Reta again plans a book of comic fiction, featuring the dim-witted Alicia, but her male editor believes her draft is "close to greatness" and "could be one of those signal books of our time . . . with a mere two or three shifts of perspective" – that is, by increasing the role of the male character Roman and exploring the theme of his search for identity. In other words, in order to attain "greatness," Reta must sacrifice Alicia, in her gendered role, and focus instead on an "Everyman" Roman and his "universal" search for identity. In deciding how to finish her book, Reta must also decide what the point of her writing is – is she writing to be taken seriously or is she writing for herself?

Ultimately, Reta decides she is writing for herself – for the joy writing gives her and because it gives her a voice. Reta begins work on the sequel to "My Thyme Is Up" as a "diversion" to forget about Norah; through her writing, she says, "I can squeeze my eyes shut, pop through a little door on the wall, and stand outside my child’s absence." Whether she is working on a serious book or "light fiction" doesn’t matter; it is the act of writing itself that gives her comfort, that redeems her. While out for dinner one night, Reta decides to "add to the literature of washroom walls," scrawling, "My heart is broken." This simple act serves to make Reta feel alive, to give her life: "At once I felt a release of pressure around my ribs. . . . I was allowed to be a receptor and transmitter both, not a dead thing but a live link." Unfortunately, her joy in writing the sequel is interrupted by her editor’s comments on the draft. Whereas, before she had heard from him, her book had been her "darling baby" and "greatest distraction," now she dreads working on the book and stops writing. In the end, she rejects her publisher’s ideas for Roman, not worrying about converting her book into a serious work of act but rather finishing it with a happy ending, "a convention of comic fiction," and asserts that her joy in writing is more important than how the book is considered by critics or whether it is included in the "canon." But it still begs the question that Reta posed about Danielle Westerman’s work – that is, if her book is ignored, what then does it amount to?

Ultimately, the value of Reta’s writing is that it gives her a voice. In a conversation with her friends, Reta realizes that men don’t really talk to women. One of her friends says, "Men aren’t interested in women’s lives" – they don’t care what women think and don’t let women "enter the conversation." But even if, in the real world, the inner and outer lives of women aren’t as important as men’s, in popular fiction, they usually are. Reta acknowledges, "It is Alicia’s skin I wear," and she refuses her editor’s request to make Roman the center of her book. In "My Thyme Is Up," Alicia’s – or Reta’s – voice is heard, and that matters, even if her work is dismissed as inconsequential. The importance of Reta’s voice is highlighted in a scene where she searches for "the perfect scarf, not the near-perfect and certainly not the impulse purchase we usually settled for" for her daughter Norah. Even though Norah provides minimal input for the scarf – she wants something blue and yellow – Reta conceives in her mind the scarf that will delight her daughter’s heart and goes to twenty different boutiques in order to find it. When she does end up finding the perfect scarf, she shows it to one of her female friends, whose eyes tear up: "It’s just that it’s so beautiful. . . . You invented it, created it out of your imagination." Even if the scarf, like a book of comic fiction, may not amount to much from a world perspective, it is still important. While Reta can’t control her daughter’s life or her happiness, she can "provide something temporary and necessary: this dream of transformation." In other words, what matters is not the end product – the scarf or the book – but it is the act of not settling, of having imagination, of creating something your own, of giving others happiness that matters. Reta finds her voice not only in Alicia, the woman, but in Alicia the woman writer, who herself is a creator. Although Reta knows, as a writer, it is poor form to also make Alicia a writer, she can’t help herself from exploring the area of writing, which "is the richest territory we can imagine. . . . This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can’t stop doing it." Her writing does matter, she concludes, because it allows her to enter a conversation normally she is excluded from; it gives her a voice in shaping her own world. If she has to sacrifice that voice to achieve greatness, it is not worth it. Having her own voice recognized and heard is what matters.

Although Reta believes that women writers are excluded from the greatness accorded the "canon," ultimately she finds a purpose to her writing because of the personal joy it gives her and the voice it gives to women. As a reader, I admit, I read "Unless" only because it was included in the "canon," as I am trying to become more well-read and add books from Dr. Boxall’s guide of 1001 important works to my collection. But, the truth is, I will be lucky to make it through even one-tenth of his list because I know, if I tried reading the whole list, I would quickly tire of trudging through accounts of dirty old white men and their supposed "everyman quest for identity," which neither interests me, gives me joy, or gives me a voice. The power in "Unless" – the thing that gives it a "force on the world" – is that it provides ordinary characters – ordinary people you meet in real life – with a voice. Even if Reta Winters isn’t a universal character – i.e., she is not an Everyman but likely appeals only to women – and she is not struggling to find her identity, her struggle to make it through each of her ordinary days is still important. Her story may not be "one for the ages," but it is enough to provide readers with a transformative moment of happiness, and that is good enough for me.
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Jessica

Jessica rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

05/26/08

Finally finished. It was alright, I suppose. However, I did enjoy the self-conscious gestures towards critical distance and narrative construction. These were well-developed and definitive. I found pleasure in Shields' exploration of these modernist tacts, although I found her feminist perspectives a bit skewed and for the most part, irritating. Her views, I felt, were lacking parallelism and often bordered on the extreme. While many may claim this to be a strong contemporary feminist text, it s...more

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Amanda

Amanda rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

05/27/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in May, 2008

I don't have a whole lot to say about this book. The central premise, that a normal young woman, raised in a normal loving suburban family, would suddenly abandon her life and become a panhandler on the streets of Toronto, is compelling. The concept of having the story told from the perspective of her mother, who has no idea why her daughter has made such a bizarre choice, seems to offer a lot of possibilities for psychological examination. But somehow the whole book seemed to fall a little f...more I don't have a whole lot to say about this book. The central premise, that a normal young woman, raised in a normal loving suburban family, would suddenly abandon her life and become a panhandler on the streets of Toronto, is compelling. The concept of having the story told from the perspective of her mother, who has no idea why her daughter has made such a bizarre choice, seems to offer a lot of possibilities for psychological examination. But somehow the whole book seemed to fall a little flat.
The speaker in the book, the mother mentioned above, is a writer, and she is always reflecting on her writing process and the way a novel should be constructed. She mentions her habit of reading obituaries because the idiosyncratic personal details that they include are the sort of perfect little traits a writer can include to make characters more relatable, realistic, and appealing. And then she fills her novel (and the novel that her novel-writing protagonist is working on) with just these sort of quirky traits-- we get an elderly, well-respected and serious writer who always wears cheap, ugly cardigans and gets weekly manicures to keep her nails immaculate; a physician who spends hours researching trilobytes; and a professional trombonist with a passionate desire to reconnect with his Albanian heritage. I guess I felt the author constantly referring to herself and her own writing process and it seemed as if she was pointing out how clever and observant she was, which I found a little annoying. This is particularly irritating because all of the characters came equipt with cute foibles but seemed to lack real psychological depth. Even the eventual explanation for her daughter's break with society, though touchingly written, seemed tacked on and wasn't fully explored.
There was also this running thread about the exclusion of women from the literary canon that kept getting on my nerves. It just seemed like a shallow feminism, maybe just another quirk culled from someone's obituary-- "She was a life-long feminist intellectual, passionate about promoting the work of underrated female writers."
This book kept me reading, but ultimately, it wasn't very satisfying.
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Donna

Donna rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

01/19/08

bookshelves: 1001-books, booker-prize, canlit, giller-prize, orange-prize

Read in February, 2004

Great book. Not the best thing I've ever read, but very thought-provoking and extremely well-written. It's touted as a story about a mom whose previously seemingly well-adjusted daughter now sits begging on a Toronto street corner with a sign around her neck reading GOODNESS. In fact, it's less about that daughter, and more about how ordinary folks deal with
extraordinary circumstances. It explores all sorts of family relationships and coping mechanisms and includes a somewhat philosophical dis...more

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Rachel

Rachel rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

01/27/08

Read in January, 2008

I gave this book 2 starts instead of 1 because it actually forced me to finish it. I'm not sure why other than the fact I was STILL wondering why her daughter was on the streetcorner...but once I discovered what I had been looking for throughout the book, I was so dissapointed and angry that I wasted my time. I also like the author of this book in the sense that I enjoyed her intellectual grammar, if you will. I felt like the book was written like a big beautiful poem, with big beautiful words p...more

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Zinta

Zinta rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

11/04/07

bookshelves: fiction

Read in October, 2003

As a writer and a mother, it wasn't but a few words into this novel by Shields that I found myself holding my breath, holding it in compassion and wonder, in acknowledgement of the artistry witnessed, of the beauty of words used with such mastery. Shields writes about a writer, and she writes about a writer who is a mother. In so many ways, one is the other, the other is the same. The character in her acts of creation sends her own goodness into the world, and while her novels seem to take unpre...more

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Tara

Tara rated it:

(review of isbn 0679311807)

07/25/07

Read in February, 2003

I had never read Carol Shields before, and yes I'm ashamed to admit it. While living in Japan my father included this book in my Christmas package as it was recommended to him by a bookseller.
I was hesitant to read a female, Canadian author after being traumatized during highschool having to read Margaret Laurence. Seriously, highschool girls should not have to read Laurence, nor the Mayor of Casterbridge.
Immediately on reading the first few pages of Unless, I was struck by Shields prose. It...more

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Michelle

Michelle rated it:

(review of isbn 0007154615)

11/27/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in November, 2008

recommended to Michelle by: Jennifer

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Rose

Rose rated it:

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10/12/08

Read in October, 2008

recommends it for: NOBODY!

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Mrs. K. Jordan

Mrs. K. Jordan rated it:

(review of isbn 0007137699)

10/08/08

bookshelves: enjoyed, suffering

Read in May, 2008

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