Dressing Up, Dressing Down

The 23 pieces gathered in Carol Shields’s delightful new collection are stories of manners—the manners of everyday life and the miracles and surprises that arise from them, and the manners of storytelling. Interestingly, the stories are arranged so as to hint at continuities among them; we are invited to read not a gathering of disparate stories but stories that conspire to make a book. The title story, “Dressing Up for the Carnival,” stresses preparation for the day ahead, and this dressing up to meet the costumes that we greet matches up nicely with the closing piece, “Dressing Down,” which deals with grandparents and nudist colonies and coffins and preparations for final departure. In reading from beginning to end, we become co-conspirators with the writer, filling in gaps and making leaps of logic as we go.

The stories are carefully turned and tuned, and in most the title serves as a “handrail” for the reader, to use a metaphor from “Dying for Love,” or as an egg from which a story may grow. “Narrative is ovarian,” as we learn in “Ilk,” a view underlined by the novelist narrator’s assertion that “Every discourse is born of a micro-discourse.” Sometimes Shields lifts something from the carnival of everyday—keys, a window, a scarf, mirrors, a harp, weather, or the proto-typical quotidian soup du jour, and finds a story. Each is a storyful of stories. “The Next Best Kiss” suggests both the linear handrail of narrative, a sequence of kisses, and the pulsing egg-question, What will develop from a kiss?

Often the everyday dissolves into something else. “Weather” recounts a strike by meteorologists. They manage to turn off the weather, so that people begin to miss what they have always taken for granted. It turns out that the weather people have gone on strike not for money or improved working conditions, but because they are not appreciated, and once appreciation is written into their contract they go back to work and release the weather they have been withholding. Snuggled in her husbands arms, the narrator tells us of weathers return, and how as they drifted in and out of wakefulness, they heard, “or perhaps imagined, the ballet slipper sounds of rain on the garage roof.”

Such delicate intricacies of awareness inform the collection, whether you find yourself drawn to the illuminations of reading and writing manners, as I am, or to the light glinting from Shields’s presentation of social manners. There is some unevenness, as you might expect from work completed over a span of years. I find “Stop!” and “Flatties: Their Various Forms and Uses” not as strong as the other stories, but the richness of the others more than compensates.

A story called “Absence,” for example, shows a brilliant touch. The narrative concerns a writer who finds herself at a faulty keyboard, one on which one letter refuses to work at all. She determines therefore to work without it. And so does Shields. She writes the entire story without using “the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.” Not only does she write an entire story without using that particular self-ish vowel, Shields embeds a series of incisive comments on writing. Her writer character knows that words “held formal levels of sense and shades of deference that were untransferable one to the other, though thousands of deluded souls hunch each day over crossword puzzles and try. The glue of resonance makes austere demands. Memory barks, and context, that absolute old cow, glowers and chews up whats less than acceptable.” This absense of the hungry self echoes with the story “Reportage,” that by extensive quotation virtually eliminates the narrator.

A great richness results from the careful management of absence, as readers of The Stone Diaries will recall. What is not in a text calls out to be filled in, and an active reader cannot resist. “Ellipsis, though uncrowned, is queen,” we read in “Ilk,” and “The word is the central modality, after all. The narrational heart.” In a story called “Invention,” we read of people who invented steering wheel-muffs, hyphens, and, most importantly for readers, the space between words, and commas and full-stops. “Emptiness has weight; absence gestures at meaning. A doorway is privileged over an actual door in its usefulness and even its beauty…A caesura locks a poem into a grid of understanding; a silence distinguishes speech from speech and thought from thought.”

Shields’s interest in biography clearly runs through the collection. As much as Shields exploits the tiny moment for story, she also knows the dangers of the moment, especially in biography. The central character in “Edith-Esther” is a novelist who fears she will be captured by her biographer. “She understood how careful you had to be with biographers; death by biography—it was a registered disease. Thousands have suffered from it, butchery by entrapment in the isolated moment.”

In “Death of an Artist,” we are invited to read a dead man’s diaries, “undiaries” the dead man has called them. Here Shields playfully mocks some of the theories and practices of biography and other modes. The diaries, we are advised, have been written in red crayon, and should be read backwards in order fully to appreciate them. So the narrative begins, taking us through the highlights of the artists life, decade by decade. The narrator reflects ironically about the artist’s dismissal of childhood as the clue to a life, despite the evidence of the red crayon. The “undiary” ends with the words “I am utterly alone,” written in red across the final page. The artist, we understand, has vested himself in his writing, dressed himself up even as he plays himself down.

These stories are, as their titles indicate, and as we expect from Carol Shields, stories of love—funny and gentle in their unfumbling delivery of love’s bumbling foibles, especially “Windows,” “Eros,” “Dressing Down,” and my own favourite, “The Next Best Kiss.” ■

Dressing Up for the Carnival, by Carol Shields, Random House Canada, Toronto, 2000, Hardcover, 241 pp. $32.95.

Birk Sproxton’s The Red-Headed Woman with the Black Black Heart recently won an award for Historical Fiction from the Manitoba Historical Society. He writes regularly for Border Crossings from Red Deer, Alberta.