(1993) The Stone Diaries (2 page)

This matter of voices directs the novel, makes it distinctive and arresting. Carol Shields has used a complex and fascinating series of narrative devices with which to tell the story, from the detached authorial voice to the voices of the various characters, by way of letters, lists, and newspaper entries. It is a bold technique that is here entirely successful. The various shifts in narrative form act as small surprises, keeping the reader intrigued.

Sometimes Daisy is allowed to speak for herself; more often, someone else is talking about her, or we hear of her in detachment, as we look over her creator’s shoulder. And then there is the sudden jolt of a letter, or the intervention of a friend or family member. This is a narrative style that lends itself to the most effective kind of economy—Carol Shields can say most by saying least. She never tells us that Alice is a somewhat prickly and difficult woman; we learn this from an aside by Fraidy Hoyt: "Alice looked gorgeous—my, she’s mellowed." And the letter sequence from which we learn about Daisy’s period as Mrs. Green Thumb, and its dismaying conclusion, is wonderfully deft. It covers a handful of pages, where a conventional narrative form probably would have gone on a great deal longer and carried far less punch.

This narrative technique has allowed Carol Shields to escape the straitjacket of a long plod through the years. She can home in on a particular event, a particular period, and bring that to life.

She can relay an important piece of information such as the death of Barker Flett, through the content of a solicitor’s letter—far more cogent than a plain statement of what has happened. She can ignore long stretches of time, but loop back to them later, as when we learn of Daisy’s college studies in nineteenth-century Italian history, revealed by her son Warren, who came across a box of old essays in the storeroom of the family home: There is a glimpse of an earlier Daisy and light is perhaps thrown on the frustrations of her later life. And the technique allows for an effective form of distancing, so that we see some events at a slant, from a throwaway comment—that Fraidy Hoyt has been widowed, that Beans (Daisy’s other girlhood friend) has been abandoned by her husband.

But perhaps the most significant effect of this technique is the way in which it can be seen to mirror the processes of memory.

Memory is not linear, chronological; neither is it a narrative.

Memory is like a series of slides, any of which may flash up at any time, in no particular order, and without links between them.

The Stone Diaries
respects chronology, it gives us the arc of Daisy’s life from birth to death, but within that structure the contrasting entries—long, short, expansive, terse—seem to mimic the way in which memory also makes a nonsense of time. In the mind, some entire years vanish into a black hole of oblivion, while a few minutes may hang there forever, brilliant with detail and effect. A childhood moment swims up when we have just been remembering an event of last month. A technique that abandons conventional narrative and plays with different voices, different ways of getting information across, seems to echo the contents of the mind, where what is seen, heard, and felt is all jumbled up—a card-index that has lost its indexing system.

But a novel requires system, above all. A novel that genuinely reflected the processes of memory would possibly be interesting and arresting but would also be pretty unreadable. We tolerate our own chaotic memories because we hold the key to the private code. While the structure of
The Stone Diaries
hints at the operation of memory, it also respects the requirements of fiction, the first of which is to remember the reader. Readers demand coherence; confuse them and you have lost them. An adventurous narrative form is only effective so long as it sweeps the reader along, and
The Stone Diaries
scores high. In fact, the switches from one voice to another, from detached overview to immediate account, from dialogue to letters, serve to keep the reader involved and expectant. You want to know what will happen next, and what has happened, but you are also drawn in by the presentation—the switches require attention.

The Stone Diaries
is a relatively short novel that seems long, an effect created by its structure. A great deal happens to many people within a short space. There is a large cast, but even without the courtesy of the family tree provided it is not hard to keep track of relationships and connections. Characters drop out and can be forgotten until some neat reintroduction, such as the reminder of the Jewish peddler who was one of the group in the Manitoba kitchen on the day of Daisy’s birth—in the words of his grandson, decades later. We discover how that day had been a seminal one for him also. New names appear with each generation, but there is the satisfactory continuity of the people whose lives run parallel to Daisy’s and who make guest appearances throughout the narrative—her girlhood friends Fraidy and Beans.

In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation.

She conjures up a character in a few lines of dialogue, in a pungent authorial aside. The cast of
The Stone Diaries
brims with sharply defined characters, whether central figures such as Cuyler Goodwill or Barker Flett, or peripheral figures such as Cuyler’s second wife, Maria, who erupts into the story in a gust of exuberant and incomprehensible Italian. It is this precision about her characters that enables Carol Shields to field such a generous cast; we don’t get confused about people because all are so distinctive.

There is one exception: Daisy herself. This is of course entirely deliberate. We never see Daisy in such sharp relief because our view of her is multifaceted. There is an ambiguity about the perception of Daisy that is a reflection of the ambiguity that hangs over any life; we are all of us some things to some people, something else to others. And because the novel is in one sense a discussion of the nature of evidence, there can be no hard and fast definition of Daisy. As the focus of the story, around whom everything turns, she must be to some degree elusive; the reader’s contribution is invited. How do you see Daisy?

For my own part, I see her differently each time I revisit the novel: Sometimes she dominates and directs, at others she is almost submerged by the claims of others. The essential quality of the best fiction is that it should offer itself afresh at each reading—you find aspects that you had apparently missed before, you home in on some feature that had passed you by is a novel so rich in characters, in events, in sharply evoked settings that it never fails to provide some new angle. If you read it with an eye to the backdrop alone, there is a range that runs from the stone quarries of Manitoba to the flat, bleak, windy landscape of Orkney, by way of prosperous Bloomington and the condominium land of Florida. Sometimes the humor stands out: the discussion of sex between young Daisy and her girlfriends, Mrs. Hoad’s spiel of instruction, the wry message contained in the letters sequence about Mrs. Green Thumb. At others you are struck by the elegance of the writing—that wonderfully accurate dialogue, the apt phrases that shine out on every page. There is no slack anywhere in this novel; it is taut from beginning to end, each paragraph essential, each section springing from its predecessor. I have enjoyed and admired all of Carol Shields’s work, and I believe to be her masterpiece.

—Penelope Lively

The Stone Diaries

CHAPTER ONE

Birth, 1905

My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband’s supper. A cookery book lay open on the table: "Take some slices of stale bread," the recipe said, "and one pint of currants; half a pint of raspberries; four ounces of sugar; some sweet cream if available." Of course she’s divided the recipe in half, there being just the two of them, and what with the scarcity of currants, and Cuyler (my father) being a dainty eater. A pick-and-nibble fellow, she calls him, able to take his food or leave it.

It shames her how little the man eats, diddling his spoon around in his dish, perhaps raising his eyes once or twice to send her one of his shy, appreciative glances across the table, but never taking a second helping, just leaving it all for her to finish up—pulling his hand through the air with that dreamy gesture of his that urges her on. And smiling all the while, his daft tender-faced look. What did food mean to a working man like himself? A bother, a distraction, perhaps even a kind of price that had to be paid in order to remain upright and breathing.

Well, it was a different story for her, for my mother. Eating was as close to heaven as my mother ever came. (In our day we have a name for a passion as disordered as hers.)

And almost as heavenly as eating was the making—how she gloried in it! Every last body on this earth has a particular notion of paradise, and this was hers, standing in the murderously hot back kitchen of her own house, concocting and contriving, leaning forward and squinting at the fine print of the cookery book, a clean wooden spoon in hand.

It’s something to see, the way she concentrates, her hot, busy face, the way she thrills to see the dish take form as she pours the stewed fruit into the fancy mold, pressing the thickly cut bread down over the oozing juices, feeling it soften and absorb bit by bit a raspberry redness. Malvern pudding; she loves the words too, and feels them dissolve on her tongue like a sugary wafer, her tongue itself grown waferlike and sweet. Like an artist—years later this form of artistry is perfectly clear to me—she stirs and arranges and draws in her brooding lower lip. Such a dish this will be. A warm sponge soaking up color. (Mrs. Flett next door let her have some currants off her bush; the raspberries she’s found herself along the roadside south of the village, even though it half kills her, a woman of her size walking out in the heat of the day.)

She sprinkles on extra sugar, one spoonful, then another, then takes the spoon to her mouth, the rough crystals that keep her alert.

It is three o’clock—a hot July afternoon in the middle of Manitoba, in the middle of the Dominion of Canada. The parlor clock (adamantine finish, gilded feet, a wedding present from her husband’s family, the Goodwills of Stonewall Township) has just struck the hour.

Cuyler will be home from the quarry at five sharp; he will have himself a good cheerful wash at the kitchen basin, and by half-past five the two of them will sit down at the table—this very table, only spread with a clean cloth, every second day a clean cloth—and eat their supper. Which for the most part will be a silent meal, both my parents being shy by nature, and each brought up in the belief that conversing and eating are different functions, occupying separate trenches of time. Tonight they will partake of cold corned beef with a spoonful of homemade relish, some dressed potatoes at the side, cups of sweet tea, and then this fine pudding. His eyes will widen; my father, Cuyler Goodwill, aged twenty-eight, two years married, will never in his life have tasted Malvern pudding. (That’s what she’s preparing for—his stunned and mild look of confusion, that tender, grateful male mouth dropping open in surprise. It’s the least she can do, surprise him like this.) She sets a flower-patterned plate carefully on top of the pudding and weights it with a stone.

A cool place, the recipe says: "Set the mould in a cool place."

(The book is an old one, printed in England more than thirty years ago, its pages limp, but the author’s tone vigorous and pungent.)

Yet where on a day like today is Mercy Goodwill to find a cool place? Even the dark stone floor under the cellar steps where she stores her milk and butter and lard has warmed up, giving off this last fortnight a queer sour smell. The Flett family, next door, has recently purchased a Labrador Ice Chest, zinc-lined, and Mrs. Flett has spoken shyly of this acquisition to Mercy, mentioning its features, its ventilating flues, the shining tin provision shelves, how a block of ice is able to last through two warm days or more.

Some sharp thought, the worry over how to keep the pudding cool, or perhaps envy for the Fletts’ new ice chest, brings on my mother’s first spasm of pain. She gives a little cry. Her eyes pull tight at the corners, as though someone has taken hold of her hair and yanked it upward so that her scalp sings. A witness, had there been a witness present in the little back kitchen, might have feared a fainting spell coming on, even though my mother is not much given to faintness. What she feels is more like a shift in the floor of her chest, rising at first, and then an abrupt drop, a squeezing like an accordion held sideways.

She looks down and observes with wonder how the blue and white stripes of her apron are breaking into colored flakes. Her hands fly straight out in the air, a reflex meant to hold back the crushing pressure, and she steadies herself by settling her shoulders and placing her palms flat on the table, leaning forward and letting go a long, soft whimper. The sound that comes from her lips is formless, loose, a wavy line of bewilderment. (Later, these words, more than any others, will attach themselves to my image of my mother: looseness, bewilderment.) For a heavy woman she perspires little, even during the height of summer, and she takes, if the truth were known, a shy pride in her bodily dryness—only now a broad band of dampness is spreading beneath her apron and down the channel of her back. She breathes rapidly, blinking as the pain wraps a series of heavy bands around her abdomen. Down there, buried in the lapped folds of flesh, she feels herself invaded.

A tidal wave, a flood.

All spring she’s been troubled with indigestion. Often in the morning, and then again at night after her young husband has gone to sleep, she’s risen from her bed and dosed herself with Bishop’s Citrate of Magnesia. When she drinks ordinary milk or sweetened tea or sugary lemonade she swallows it down greedily, but Bishop’s cool chalky potion she pours into a china cup and sips with deep, slow concentration, with dignity. She doesn’t know what to think.