But, Can Women Write?

...

Unless
By Carol Shields
Fourth Estate
Price: pound;6.50

This autumn the Booker jury announced war on 8220;pompous, portentous and pretentious fiction8221; 8212; thus The Autograph Man was immediately tossed out of the shortlist. It was the dawn of a new era, they declared, time to break from an extended emphasis on 8220;too many big male books8221; 8212; and so, cynics would suggest, Unless, Carol Shields8217;s slim book about a woman writing about a woman writing, made it to the last six.

Shields, sixtysomething Canadian author of nine previous novels as well as, most recently, a critical appreciation of Jane Austen, has often spoken of the dismissive manner in which so-called women8217;s novels are ghettoized. It8217;s a concern shared by her narrator in Unless, perhaps the most gentle, quietly humourous and meditative novel to be shipped to our bookshelves in years. Reta Winters, 44, much hailed translator of an ageing French feminist8217;s poetry and memoirs and herself author of a mildly successful work of light fiction, punctuates a traumatic year by raging against the systemic exclusion of women writers and women8217;s concerns from lists of the weighty and the important.

It8217;s hilarious. Shields recently recalled a talk by George Steiner. A question she posed elicited the reply that there were no significant women writers in the 20th century, though he could recall some from the 19th. Here8217;s Reta in front of the idiot box: 8220;But wait! 8212; here comes the 8216;woman8217; question, delivered by the rumpled, anxious chairperson, coiffed, suited, sweating, consulting her script with a swift, fearful eye: 8216;What about pause women writers? Surely women have reshaped the discourse of our century.8217; 8216;Hmm,8217; he says, 8216;now the nineteenth century 8212; there were some interesting women writers back then.8217; Yes, but. The program is over in thirty seconds and he8217;s not about to bring a woman8217;s name to his stately fadeout.8221;

This theme of women8217;s exclusion from the frame runs through the book. Alicia, Reta8217;s fictional character, mulls over it. Reta writes furious, unposted letters to men who commit this act. She imagines the sad, lonely life of the nameless woman who once inhabited her pretty, suburban home. She takes umbrage when her editor suggests that she make her sequel more male-centric. And all Reta demands as a feminist is that women be allowed access to all that8217;s human.

These digressions 8212; often ironic, sometimes self-mocking, always resonant 8212; help Reta survive a sudden jolt to her sunny life. Her husband, left of the left in the good old 8217;70s but now a thriving doctor whose only snub at tradition is his refusal to knot a tie, and her two school-going, chirpy daughter and she herself, with her books and her coffee-club and library board meets, are stunned into incomprehension when their eldest takes up silent residence on a street corner.

Why has Norah, 19, smart and popular, donned a board around her neck that says 8220;goodness8221;? Why does she go back each night to a shelter for the homeless? Why does she give away nine-tenths of her collections to other street people? As the family visit Norah, bearing wodges of cash and bags of food and clothes they know she8217;ll give away, they work this aberration into their weekly rhythm and try to make sense of it.

Tom, her husband, says Norah has suffered a trauma. Reta disagrees. She knows the malaise8230; Norah merely has a severe case of her own problem. Norah realises she can8217;t lay claim to the entire universe 8212; what woman can? 8212; so she8217;s airbrushing herself out of the matrix. She8217;s attempting peaceful self-extinction. Greatness can8217;t be hers, but goodness can. But is it really that complicated?

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This is a deceptively simple book. It certainly didn8217;t need any qualifications by an unnecessarily defensive jury to be singled out for honour.