Many of the letters in A Memoir of Friendship are about writing and reading, books and manuscripts; Blanche Howard and Carol Shields swapped book recommendations and writing frustrations and philosophies alongside the everyday stuff and nonsense of life.
In 1993, Blanche wrote to Carol Shields, two years after their novel, A Celibate Season, was published:
“And thank you for all those nice things you said about me. We seem to stand in relation to one another as mutual mentors, since I am always in awe of your talent and studying your work and methods for enlightenment. Odd to have a relationship where mentorship works both ways, isn’t it?”
In A Celibate Season (1991), each writer adopts the perspective of a spouse whose marriage is strained by the period of separation occasioned by the wife’s decision to take a government job in Ottawa, which requires that the husband remains home to pay the phone bill (or, as it happens, not pay it) and to raise their daughter and son.
Each writes a series of letters over several months. (A brief mention is made to their preferring posted letters to e-mail, which seems to have been written into the paperback reprint in the later-90s, and which is ineffective, because later, when there actually are time-sensitive matters, surrounding transportation arrangements, a couple obviously would have altered their preference to keep communication open, had email truly been an option.)
This is the era when it was not unheard of for women to keep their maiden names when they married, not unheard of for women to return to work after they had children, not unheard of for women who choose to remain childfree. Not unheard of, but not common either. So Jock’s decision to prioritize her career halfway across the country would have been uncommon.
Chas’ unemployment adds complication. When he misses a beat, it’s not because he’s being expected to work the sort of double shift that Jock (for Jocelyn) has accepted unthinkingly; he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. The crises range from how to manage unexpected and lingering houseguests to an inordinately large purchase of lentils (predating Jock’s departure).
Jock’s adjusting too: navigating a politicized environment, being off-stage when transformations in parenting and housing responsibilities unfold, and she’s reaching for integrity in situations where its nature seems to shift rapidly.
There are many subtle references to space and territory and the kind of apathy that arises when one is too far away to understand how other people are living their lives. When Jock flies north for work, she sees the land differently: “Hours and hours over frozen tundra. I think I really understood for the first time the vastness of Canada and the audacity of a civilization that would try to capture and change it.”
Those who are predisposed towards the epistolary form will enjoy the novel immensely, for the intimacy and immediacy of it all. It’s also an excellent opportunity to observe the ins and outs of relationships that are less clear when one can depend on scenes and dialogue to navigate the between-spaces.
Jock, for instance, is troubled when she learns that her daughter has had her first period, an event for which Chas was unprepared. (“Curious, isn’t it, that half the world is involved in a ritual of which the other half is ignorant? It makes you wonder how many other mysteries there are that are guarded by one sex against the other.”)
But the unease she experiences when she learns that her son is out well past midnight most nights is something else. Not because she thinks her husband Chas should be handling it differently (the teenager’s grades are still good, he’s not breaking any rules) but because she can’t observe the specific details and interactions which would allow her gut to respond. Even when you can exchange letters or talk on the telephone, gestures and tone and environment are all lost, and each conversation is isolated and staged. Intimacy erodes, with matters small and large.
And everything is changing, all the time, for wives and husbands, for women and men. Jock writes: “I guess invading space must be next, that’s what little boys dream of now. (Little girls? I notice no one ever cleans space up.)”
Shove those bulk-buy lentils into the airlock, teleport the unfolded laundry into the cargo hold, and wash the fingerprints off those handheld screens: because whether Jock is only coming back home between assignments or whether she’s giving up on her parliamentary work, she’s in motion. Growing. Becoming.
(Earlier this year, I reread Small Ceremonies, and I’ve been reading The Box Garden and A Celibate Season with Bookish Beck; we’re reading Larry’s Party now and planning to reread Happenstance together. Let us know if you’d care to join.)
I too am a fan of epistolary novels, and this sounds like a very interesting take on the genre. As you say in your commentary, it’s often the intimacy of this type of novel that really pulls the reader in – the sense of eavesdropping on the most personal of ‘conversations’ (albeit in the written form).
The first time I read this, I would’ve been engaged in many epistolary ventures of my own, but now the written letters are few-and-far-between and, even so, I still enjoyed reading and revisiting this novel.
I have never seen this books anywhere, and I do love Shields. Whether I just spaced out the year it was published, or it wasn’t available in the U.S., who knows? Fortunately everything is available everywhere now, so I will look for this 0nline.
Back then, it wasn’t assured that Canadian novels were available for purchase in the U.S., so I suspect that this was one of the ones better known north of the existing border. I don’t think you’ll lose your Shields-Lover badge. Not yet, anyway!
This book fascinates me, and I’m so glad that something about this, the mundane aspects of living life is getting attention in a published book. People may see it as a boring topic, but for women especially, those of us who are tasked with simply keeping things running, this book appeals 🙂
It’s hard to believe that this required some daring, only a few years ago, to have a woman writing fiction and taken seriously for it, let alone to write about insert heightened sneer the domestic front and be taken seriously for it. This is certainly a quiet novel, but many of our lives are quiet lives, as you’ve said.
I like the idea of hearing their ‘real’ voices in Memoir of Friendship. I’ve only read one correspondence volume, Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, and even though I knew nothing about either author beforehand I found it captivating. The lentils was one of my favourite details here, too!
I’ve really enjoyed some collections like that, without any context of the writers’ works apart from that volume of correspondence. So far, Larry doesn’t seem to be interested in consuming pulses of any sort. I wonder if he would try to nibble on them uncooked.
I love epistolary novels, but they either work wonderfully or they come off as being very artificial. It sounds like some of the events in the book worked better than others. It seems like it would work better to not have an email reference. I prefer letters, too, but sometimes email is just more necessary when it comes to time sensitive issues or problems that needed to be sorted sooner than later. I do think it is cool that there are two writers and surely that must have given it a nice flavor of two distinct individuals. I wonder how they decided to do this-create an outline and then writer the letters to let the story grow naturally?
For the most part, I’ve been lucky; I can’t think of that many books of letters that I’ve not enjoyed. I’m guessing that email reference would be removed in a present-day rewrite, to allow the story to exist in a time when people still routinely exchanged hand-written letters. There is a satisfying explanation of the way that they composed the novel included, but I didn’t want to spoil it. While reading, I had fun imagining that I could tell what they were up to behind the scenes (I read that after I’d finished reading-turns out I was wrong).
Well, this is exciting – a Shields I haven’t read! I wonder if that’s because it was a collaboration. Must get my hands on a copy.
What a lovely surprise: have a look for the collection of letters while you’re at it. It would make a great reading companion.
Milly, my partner would leave me with the kids for a few weeks while she flew home to see her mother. A different situation of course but with some of the same elements. I only discovered our oldest daughter was getting her period because I was the one doing the washing. On the subject of vastness, Australians talk about the ‘Outback’ but I’m sure the 75% of the population in the south east corner don’t really realise what that means. For instance the whole western half of the continent only has bitumen roads in one corner and around the coast. So I can imagine flying over endless tundra (I’ve seen Ice Truckers and no, I can’t imagine driving across it, though I did read a thriller once where a city woman hijacked a semi in Canada and headed north)
It’s true, there’s a familiarity that arises from the simple act of doing laundry! Did you ever have to use up a bulk purchase of lentils or forget to pay the phone bill? 🙂
That’s very similar to the situation in this country. Once I told a friend that I was going north for a holiday and she asked what north meant. It meant a six-hour-long drive north to me. Near-north, then, not north, she clarified, because she’d grown up in a town about six hours still north of that. But I bet there are a great number of communities who would call that near-north too. Maybe another twelve hours beyond that would fit their definition of north.
That thriller sounds vaguely familiar!