In the first week of Covid-19 lockdown, I pulled The Box Garden off the shelf, opened it to read:
“That there are no certainties in life. That we change hourly or even from one minute to the next, our entire cycle of being altered, our whole selves shaken with the violence of change.”
A reread through Carol Shields’ work has been in the works since a friend observed that I haven’t written much about her here, although the phrase “buried in print” was inspired by The Republic of Love: “Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”
So, I began. With schools and public buildings closed, bars and restaurants still sorting out a pathway to closure, retail stores and malls caught in a strange limbo: in that week, living that change by the hour and by the minute, I was beckoned back to Carol Shields’ tender and matter-of-fact way of telling stories.
First in my reading log was The Stone Diaries, in 1994; then, Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden, in 1997. It was meeting Daisy Goodwill Flett that originally pulled me into her backlist territory, via trade-paperback copies purchased from the women’s bookstore, their covers all title, no artwork.
The copies I’m rereading are Totem paperbacks, even older than those, two finds from different and long-ago Trinity College sales. This Small Ceremonies copy from 1978 has remarkable blurbs on the cover, two blatantly Canadian (one from the Globe and Mail newspaper and the other from Macleans magazine) and one designed to attract a different sort of reader, pulled from the Financial Post: “Superb bitchiness.”
I’m taking my time with this reread. Small Ceremonies (1976) is arranged chronologically, beginning with September, each chapter describing one month of Judith Gill’s life, through to the following May. I plan to finish reading in May, when Judith is living in May.
As Jack observes in Happenstance (1980), “the ends of all stories are contained in their beginnings” and, here, the end of Small Ceremonies is just the beginning of my rereading project.
(It’s just one of a few new reading projects now underway, including #HereandElsewhere, #TheWritingLife and #ReadtheChange, and a couple of new ones, like this, which have blossomed with stay-at-home advisories in effect.)
In my memory, Small Cermonies recorded the year in which the Gill family were living in the Spaulding family’s Birmingham flat, while husband and father Martin was on sabbatical. I remembered Judith’s record of that September, the “real beginning of the year”, as being an opportunity to reflect on her everyday life at a distance.
With public policy in many countries now driven by an effort to “flatten the curve” of this novel coronavirus, a lot of us are thinking more about home and what it means, just like Judith. The Gills are away from their familiar home and inhabiting an unfamiliar home, which is the Spaulding family’s familiar home, while they inhabit an unfamiliar home in Cyprus.
I say ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’ because Judith is clear that her familiar and customary home, in the Greenhills suburb of a small Canadian city, isn’t the kind of house she imagined herself living in, only a place she used to describe as a temporary place to roost. “This place, 62 Beaver Place, is not really me.” But now she lives there. “We could calculate, if we chose, the exact dimensions of our delusions.”
But, in fact, on rereading I realize that Judith is looking back on that year. It’s still very much on her mind, but time has moved on. As it does. So she is back on Beaver Place for this realization, which is where the novel begins:
“Sunday night. And the thought strikes me that I ought to be happier than I am.”
Scrolling through social media in recent weeks, it’s a question I sense lingering behind so many lovely photos, the sort which appear with little commentary, perhaps a thin string of hashtags, filtered signals of something-like-contentment.
The “small ceremonies” that Judith’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Meredith, observes, are the small ceremonies that Judith creates and sustains. Sometimes unwittingly, as with suggesting on a second Sunday that they could have had garlic bread with their meal, which Meredith notes was on the menu the previous Sunday. Sometimes deliberately, as with the High Tea meal they continue to enjoy on Sunday afternoons, a ritual carried across the ocean, to Beaver Place.
“But we’ve never managed to capture that essential shut in coziness, that safe-from-the-storm solidarity. We fly off in midair. Our house, perhaps, is too open, too airy, and then again we are not the same people we were then; but still we persist.”
Even in the unfamiliar, we can create our own “small ceremonies”. And, if we are fortunate, we can enjoy that “essential shut in coziness, that safe-from-the-storm solidarity”. The Gill family is moving through the months and, in my timeline, the curve is flattening.
I really enjoyed this post. Carol Shields is ideal reading for lockdown. I love The Box Garden and Small Ceremonies (reread them last fall, so they’re fresh in my mind), but I too started with The Stone Diaries. Glad to hear it holds up. Not surprised.
Thanks! By now, I’ve just finished rereading A Celibate Season. I’m amazed by how many key plot points (there is some plot, it’s not all character) I’ve flat out forgotten. It brings an additional layer of joy to the rereading.
I had no idea that’s how you got “Buried In Print”! Love it. I have read a couple of Carol Shields books but it’s been a long time since I’ve read one of them. Really wonderful stories.
You might enjoy her Swann, if you’ve not read it, because there is a mystery element to it, and I think you’d like the idea of the “found poems” on little scraps of paper. But it’s also character-driven and the number of perspectives do require some concentration whereas I know you’ve been looking for super engaging and entertaining stuff these days, so maybe another time.
I could be way off here, but I sense there’s a comment in her writing about how people’s homes can affect the way they live, the way they feel about their lives, and the way they see themselves? I personally went through a shift like that when we moved about 2 and a half years ago. Our old house was ‘older’, smaller, smaller windows, and in the suburbs of Calgary. We then upgraded to a larger home in the inner city, an infill with big tall windows and gray walls. For the first few months I felt so vulnerable being in the house, with its big windows, lots of light, and closer to the ‘action’ of downtown. I’m used to it now, but it was quite the transformation, and it took me a while to identify why I felt so uncomfortable those first few months…
It’s interesting to think about how we choose to inhabit our spaces, how we feel like we do and don’t fit into them and, when we have the option of choosing them, it can be very puzzling when we choose something that is in conflict with our ideas about/hopes for our inner selves. I can relate to the windows/vulnerability aspect of what you’ve described, because where we were living before, on a main floor, there were many buildings and trees and a verandah, so that even though we had big old windows, the light all around us never reached indoors, and after that we moved into a second-floor space with light everywhere. Also, we should read Carol Shields’ story, “Windows”, together, in homage to our window discoveries! (Also also, thank you for the word ‘infill’. Not in my vocabulary previously and there are so many of those homes being constructed in our neighbourhood now.)
Infill is a term I never heard until moving to Calgary, but I suppose its more common now? Honestly I think our house is sort of ugly, I never really wanted to move into a newer home like this but we love the location haha
Ever since we read Unless (which I found ever so slightly disappointing) for my book club in November, I’ve been hankering to read or reread more Shields. I put The Stone Diaries on the rereading pile, but there are also a few of hers that I’ve never gotten hold of (including Box Garden and Small Ceremonies) and I’ve been contemplating an online secondhand book binge. Your vintage paperback cover is so quaint; it reminds me of a cover I once saw on Anne Tyler’s first book. I’ll let you know if I get hold of any more Shields and can join in. I never knew where your blog name came from!
IIRC, I enjoyed Unless much more on a second reading, but I’d have to check my notes. I can see where its format might be a little distancing if one had come to it out of The Stone Diaries. It’s another that I reread for a bookclub and I’ve reread it a couple of times since and always feels as though I notice something different. I’m ready to start The Box Garden now and I’m quite looking forward to it, as when I reread it for #1977Club, I didn’t remember anything about the characters who had also appeared in Small Ceremonies, so that will be a nice element to play with on rereading this time. Anne Tyler is another I’d like to spend more time reading/rereading, but I only have her earliest books on hand.
Ah, so this is one of the new reading projects you’ve been alluding to. How lovely! She’s a writer I’ve heard of, but my knowledge of her work is pretty thin, I have to admit.
Larry’s Party definitely rings a bell, though – I may well have read it at the time of its publication some 20 or so years ago when I was probably too young to fully appreciate its subtleties. It’ll be interesting to see how your responses to these novels have changed over the years, particularly your sympathies towards different characters based on their ages and circumstances.
You’re in for a treat, then. I’m sure you will enjoy her work whenever you do get to it. An echo of Taylor’s themes, a glimmer of the darkness that lies beneath Pym’s writing, a focus on relationships and loneliness (within and around them) a la Brookner: start collecting now, so they’re within reach when the mood strikes. 🙂
That could be. I think it received more attention overseas than had been true for her prior novels (at that time). And, yes, her style is unaffected and that book, in particular, feels very direct and uncomplicated, particularly at the beginning, so if you weren’t peering into the shadows and lifting the corners of the literary coverlet, you could miss the subtle observances and the layering. It wasn’t until I reread it for a bookclub, years ago, that I started to see another side of it.
Carol Shields has somehow been calling to me as well lately, though I’m not so well read in her as you are, and not all of them would be rereads. Her collection of verse, Coming to Canada, is probably highest on my list.
I hadn’t twigged to the fact that Buried In Print was drawn from The Republic of Love.
Very much looking forward to what you make of this!
I’ve only missed one poetry collection, but I can’t recall, in this moment, whether it was that one. (In some ways, I don’t want to finish, y’know?)
The quotation used to be more prominently displayed–it’s buried (ha!) on some inner pages now, I think–but with this reread, I must remedy that. [Look at all those dashes!]
Next up will be The Box Garden–but briefly, because I reread it for #1977Club–and then Happenstance .
Hmm. I should think about Box Garden, which I haven’t read.
I do definitely understand not wanting to finish. Though, in my case, I found The Stone Diaries so devastating I could barely continue for a while… (note the natural, but perhaps ill-advised, inclination toward ellipsis there…)
I’m not sure if you know there’s a connection between the characters in Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden? But I think you could read them as companions (like Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka stories, connected but not serially).
I checked, it’s Intersect that I haven’t read. Shortly after moving to Toronto, I borrowed Coming to Canada from the library (it hadn’t been available where I was living previously). (And, hahaha…)
This sounds like an excellent re-reading project. I have to admit to having read just one Carol Shields novel – Unless – a long time ago. She is a writer I have meant to explore properly for a long time.
Unless is very finely crafted indeed and a popular place to begin. But I think you might enjoy the soft saga-ness of The Stone Diaries or the slightly sassy tone of Larry’s Party. If I’d been going to choose for you, I’d not have thought of Unless, so I’m thinking you’ll find other favourites amongst her oeuvre, whenever you do get around to exploring. (I know, SMBSLT.)
Another excellent reading project that should last you a while! And, as usual, I’m tempted to join in – I have quite a few of her books on my shelf, but the only one I’ve read in recent years is Unless. Small Ceremonies sounds like a perfect read for these times!
How quickly I finish probably depends on how quickly libraries reopen and my borrowing habits resume. In theory I could finish this year, and I’d like to (one every three weeks or so, and they read so comfortably that that’s plenty of time). Didn’t you recently read Happenstance though?
Oh yeah! I did! snort
I find rereading a comfort. I never remember a lot of what’s in a book anyway so I might as well read good old books as take a chance on new ones. My shelves are full so that when I retire I can reread to my heart’s content.
Just yesterday I read (in a novel) about a character who could never remember what she had read and someone said it was because she was a quick reader. Predictably, I have already forgotten which book I read it in. But we can both relate, I’m sure!
How lovely that your blog name was inspired by Carol Shields. Republic of Love is one of my favourites of hers, not so well know here in the UK. I’ve become hopeless at rereading – there are always so many shiny new books catching my eye – but a Carol Shields project would be very rewarding, I’m sure.
Same here, not as well known. Although there was also a film of it (as with Unless and Swann and a couple of her short stories — none of which likely made it overseas). Meanwhile, I just love seeing all the new books you’re reading, and how devoted you are to keeping up with certain authors, and I wish that I was doing THAT too!