Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780007154616
ISBN number: 0007154615
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 336
Printing Date: May 01, 2003
Publishing house: Harper Perennial
Release Date: April 29, 2003
Sale Popularity Level: 282615
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Product Description:
Reta Winters, 44-year-old successful author of lightsummertime fiction, has always considered herself happy, even blessed. That is, until her oldest daughter Norah mysteriously drops out of college to become a panhandler on a Toronto street corner -- silent, with a sign around her neck bearing the word 'Goodness'.
Amazon.com Review:
'A life is full of isolated events,' writes Carol Shields near the end of Unless, 'but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define... words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, therefore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.' Shield's explanation for her novel's title lends meaning to this multilayered narrative in which a mother's grief over a daughter's break with the family revises her feminist outlook and pushes her craft as a writer in a new direction.
The oldest daughter of 44-year-old Reta Winters suddenly, inexplicably, drops out of college and ends up on a Toronto street corner panhandling, with a cardboard sign around her neck that reads 'goodness.' The quiet comforts of Reta's small-town life and the constancy of her feminist perspective sustain her hope that her daughter will snap out of this, whatever 'this' is. Threaded into her family's crisis is her ongoing internal elegy on the exclusion of women from the literary canon, which she transposes to mean her daughter's exclusion from humanity. Reta wonders if her daughter has discovered, as she herself did years before, that the world is 'an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors,' and has chosen to pursue the one thing that doesn't require power or a voice: goodness.
In her own writing, Reta reaffirms her own sense of self, as well as her sense of humor. As her theoretical reflections on modern womanhood play counterpoint to her unwavering sense of creating a home and keeping her family together, Reta's smarts and fears form a wonderfully coherent narrative--a life worth reading about. With Unless, the inaugural title in HarperCollins's Fourth Estate imprint, Shields (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries) once again asserts her place in the canon. --Emily Russin
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Rated by buyers 
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This is a "gauzy" novel about a mother's reaction to her daughter's withdrawal from life and decision to panhandle on a street corner. By "gauzy," I mean that the prose is concise and reveals only certain aspects of the story and characters. There is plenty of white space to be filled by the imagination. The prose is not overburdened with details. The book is tinged with feminism and the idea that women are destined for "goodness" but not "greatness." I found this novel to be engaging throughout and imaginative.
Rated by buyers -
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 very 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 very 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 ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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UNLESS by Carol Shields is an experience, a gift to its reader and to the literature of women. I found it moving and touching in so many, many sensitive places in my own life and feeling. I laughed; I cringed; I cried. It is very beautifully written, very palatable, and yet deals with very sensitive events in its cast. I don't know too much about Carol Shields, but I wondered to what extent this book was autobiographical. It seems this book might have been her last published work. It was interesting to me how she wrote, what she wrote: namely, it was real but not raw. I think it is a masterpiece.
Rated by buyers -
Reta keeps trying to count her blessings. She is a middle-aged woman with a career doing some literary French to English translation and writing a couple of novels of her own. Reta is married to a doctor, lives a comfortable life, has a handful of really good friends and two teenage daughters living with her. There are lots of good things in Reta's life. But there is also one gaping wound in her life, something so painful that sometimes Reta finds it hard to get through her days. Reta's oldest daughter, Norah, nineteen years old, has dropped out of college in order to sleep nights at a homeless shelter and spend days sitting on a street corner begging for money.
Reta and her husband don't know what to do about Norah. She won't talk to them, won't explain why she has chosen this life. She absolutely won't come home or go back to school. Reta worries that if she pushes Norah too much, then the girl might take a more drastic step toward isolation. So she drives by the corner. She takes packages of food and clothes that she assumes Norah gives away to others. She donates money to the homeless shelter. But mostly she tries to find a reason for Norah's behavior.
Reta questions her own mothering skills and feels guilty that perhaps some defect in herself drove her daughter to this choice. For a short time she blames the boy Norah was dating just before she quit school. Then Reta becomes fixated on society at large and its focus on maleness, its relegation of women to the shadows, hardly mentioned and even more rarely considered important in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps Norah noticed this trend and decided to treat herself as unimportant, as society sees her.
Despite Reta's broken heart, life must go on, and it does in this book. But as Reta lives her day-to-day life, taking care of her family, writing her novel, meeting friends for coffee, Norah's living on the streets is a constant backdrop to her life.
I really liked Reta's character and the way she dealt with this family tragedy. I thought she was realistic and sympathetic, and I enjoyed seeing things through her eyes. Her helplessness when she thought about Norah was moving, and I admired her ability to continue on with her life while trying to cope with what was happening with Norah.
Rated by buyers -
Carol Shields' last novel, "Unless," is a refreshing intellectual and literary treat. I enjoyed this novel so much I read it twice in quick succession. The novel is a fitting capstone to an illustrious literary career.
There are three stories intertwined in this short novel. First, there is the story of Reta Winters, the mother, a woman whose 18-year-old daughter has inexplicably and suddenly dropped out of life to sit mute on a Toronto street corner panhandling with a sign around her neck reading, "GOODNESS." Second, it is the story of Reta Winters, the author, a woman in the process of writing a comic novel called "My Thyme is Up" and also assisting her feminist mentor, Danielle Westerman, translate her childhood memoirs. Finally, it is the story of Reta Winters, the feminist, a woman quietly raging against the marginalization of women in all walks of life, but especially in the world of literary publishing.
Much of the novel focuses on the nature of goodness. Reta wonders if her daughter's homelessness is some kind of protest against female powerlessness. Perhaps her daughter has suddenly become aware that she must settle for goodness, since greatness still appears to be a realm reserved for men only.
Reta is a 44-year old Canadian writer and translator living in rural Orangetown, Ontario. Reta is a writer in the process of creating a novel...so there is this fascinating infinite digression about a woman writer writing a novel about another woman writer writing a novel. Winters has much to say about the process of writing that is both humorous and insightful, but mostly she rants brilliantly about the marginalization of woman authors.
Reta is a charming, social, busy woman with many friends and responsibilities. She is an intellectual, a feminist, and a social activist. She and her common-law husband, Tom, have three daughters. Until her eldest daughter suddenly takes up living as a homeless person on the streets of Toronto, Reta has been living a life of extraordinary familial happiness. As the book opens, Reta's world is shattered by the loss of her daughter to the streets of Toronto. Her heart is broken--she is grieving, and desperate to understand her daughter's behavior. The novel takes place over the course of a year as Reta copes with her loss and ultimately comes to understand the motivation behind her daughter's actions.
The novel is chock full of feminist rage and humor. The homeless daughter plot holds the piece together, but it is insignificant against the weight of the whole. In my estimation, the whole hangs together mainly through the irresistible wellspring of interior musings from Reta's mind. What keeps you reading is finding out as much as you can about this very real, and most intriguing protagonist.
"Unless" is overflowing with life--a work brimming with ambiguity and nuance. This book is so alive, I swear...one has just to pick it up to feel the heartbeat within.
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