“A Fairly Conventional Woman” by Carol Shields

A Fairly Conventional Woman is the story of 40-year-old Chicago housewife Brenda Bowman, “urbanite to the core,” who is confronted by a mid-life crisis of values and concomitant emotions while attending a Philadelphia quiltmaking conference. Unfortunately, it is a story which never quite makes it because of a stylistic presentation that is awkward, confusing, and clumsily articulated. Added to these faults is Shields’s inability to develop her subject matter naturally and convincingly; ultimately, the characters and action are reduced to the level of silliness.

The novel, then, raises important questions about Shields’s lack of artistic growth. Coming as the fourth novel in a succession of stories dealing with similar subject matter (including the companion volume, Happenstance (1980), Small Ceremonies (1976) and The Box Garden (1977), A Fairly Conventional Woman approaches exhaustion on a topic limited in scope by its very nature. Shields has been criticized in the past for a choice of subject matter incapable of holding sufficient reader interest and attention. At the outset, her latest story appears to be nothing more than an extended juvenile essay on Brenda’s trip to the quilting bee à la Harlequin romance.

Ironically, it becomes a story that is reflexive, bordering on self-mockery. That is to say, what Shields sets out to do and what she does are two different stories. The result is disastrous.

Brenda, the central protagonist, anxiously awaits her day of departure from Chicago to the quilting conference in Philadelphia, a city representative of American freedom. Although devoted to her two children and successful husband (who has persuaded her to go), the trip will allow Brenda a brief chance to escape from her familiar domestic environment. Her husband, Jack, a respected historian at a mid-West institute, tells her it will be a “valuable experience”. Once outside the safe and secure comforts of urban domesticity, the daily boring routines of middle-class suburbia, Brenda is beset by anxiety and doubt about past events and present situations in her life. In retrospect, she views her personal “history” with remorse and guilt. A bastard child who experienced a traumatic event in childhood (her mother’s death), Brenda married on whim because she “wanted a pink kitchen”. The fantasy she yearned for naively offered her both an environment of material comfort and protective safety.

During her stay at a Philadelphia hotel, Brenda is caught up in a brief interlude with a stranger, Barry Ollershaw. Their encounter causes Brenda to reassess her marriage, its inherent values, and to question her identity. Finally, after choosing the path of fidelity, Brenda envisions her arrival back home while en route, painfully aware of the familiar environment she will be returning to.

Whether A Fairly Conventional Woman is interpreted as narrative quiltmaking or woven storytelling, its fabric is nevertheless the most “dismayingly theatrical”, contrived and uneven of her stories to date. Brenda’s neighbour, Hap Lewis, utters a similar verdict:

There’s something so contained about this, not quiet exactly, but you know, slow moving, like someone trying to say something, but they can’t get the words out. Know what I mean?

Even if Shields doesn’t hear the more subliminal, subtler messages of her own characters, the technical faults and errors in aesthetic judgment committed in the telling of this tale remain essential problems.

Despite a well-structured plot, an ear for believable dialogue and a delicate, ironic subtext tempered with humour, the story loses impact with the regularity of clockwork.

Particularly annoying are Shields’s regular and frequent lapses into purple passages and contrived description. She continues to strain for expression at the most important moments in the plot. The inane phrases she manufactures serve to detract from the story flow through sheer drudgery and confused logic.

Examples of awkward phrasings, ambiguous expression, contrived tropes, and unclear meanings are abundant. What follows is a brief catalogue of literary offences: “hands flapping pinkly”; “a kind of gummy pleasantness adhered to her like plaque”; “a perfumed looseness”; “a tough, jokey sisterhood”; “to plunge with a brave face into low-budget entertaining”; “the thought came like a streak of lightning cutting swift stripes on sleepy darkness”; “with syllables securely riveted and lightly rusted like ingots long stored in a vault”; “being borne forward on rails of blue oxygen, her boots kicking out from under the brilliant folds, punching sharp prints in the wafery layer of snow” and so on.

Shields’s forte is the simple description, simply stated. Parts of the novel deserve merit on these grounds, but they are few. It’s a credo pointed out one hundred pages into the plot and definitely not adhered to:

…sweetness, simplicity and soul. A trinity for the honest artist, the man or woman not afraid of the label…of artisan. One who, in fact, rejoices in this acknowledgment of his or her utility in a world so badly in need of refreshment.

But Shields is too often tempted to let her pen wander away from “sense and sensibility” in vain attempts to delineate complex emotions, states of mind and metaphorical descriptions. She also proceeds on several occasions to ramble into the esoteric arena of Jung and the archetypes of the collective unconscious; Freudian repressed libido; sprinklings of sexuality à la D.H. Lawrence; an academic mixture of Mircea Eliade, Otto Rank, art and morality, mythology, eschatology and fictional closure. I admire Shields for her ambition and eagerness. I don’t admire the results.

The central and unifying motif of the novel, the quilt as symbol of artistic creation, process, and object begins to work well. But too often we are aware of Shields struggling to articulate ideas and emotions either through the persona of Brenda or by way of the narrator. As a result, Shields abandons control of her material and reduces her characters to mere mouthpieces which randomly pour out abstract concepts about art, artist, and community. Due to carelessness then, her characters become static and inadequate.

For example, faced with an opportunity for an extramarital affair, Shields places both Brenda and Barry in the same bedroom, has them put on pajamas, crawl into the same bed, wrap themselves in each other’s arms, and then fall quietly asleep. Consequently, these two characters appear like unbelievable automatons. Either this is wishful thinking by Shields or her vision is somewhat myopic.

Shields, however, is not a writer without promise. If she writes her next novel with new and refreshing content, clearly articulated, and attends to the logistics of metaphor and simile, the work could well achieve real distinction. Otherwise, she will continue to produce hasty material well below her potential. ■

Robert Newman is a Winnipeg writer and communications consultant.