|
Were
it not for the fact that The Stone Diaries won the
Pulitzer Prize, it probably would be either out of print right
now or forgotten like Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years.
Because the subject is women's lives, many readers failed
to grasp the depth and complexity of this novel, a faux biography
of a woman living a mundane life so typical of women in the
mid-twentieth century. In 1995, this book was big news in
the U.S., but never big enough to breech through the cocoon
of women's literary fiction.
It's
a shame. The Stone Diaries is as rich and magical as
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years
of Solitude, as American as E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime,
and in many ways as structurally experimental as any David
Foster Wallace book. But books written by women about women
in the twentieth century get stopped by the glass ceiling.
Luckily, the Pulitzer committee hasn't been shy about recognizing
these books.
The basic
plot is simple enough: The Stone Diaries documents
a woman's life from birth to death. It's the execution that
brings it into the metafictional. It poses as a biography
written from artifacts of Daisy Goodwill Flett's life. We
hear from her friends and family. We see letters others have
written to her, never ones she has written herself. We see
responses to her long running newspaper column about gardening,
but we never see even a snippet of a column. Daisy herself
is ever elusive. She's never quoted in any way. Until the
end of the book, the most memorable utterance she makes within
the book itself is a sneeze.
Stones
and gardens are symbols throughout the book. Her mother, as
an orphan, is given the last name Stone, as are all the girls
in the orphanage. Her father is a stonecutter, who, after
her mother's death in childbirth, devotes his life to building
a stone pyramid to Daisy's mother. But the newborn Daisy is
given to a neighbor, an avid gardener, to raise. Daisy spends
the rest of her life traveling between cold dead stone, an
industry that employs many of the men in the book, and lush
lively gardens mostly tended by women.
Intriguingly,
all the major women in the book are fatherless. Daisy's mother
is an orphan, Daisy is raised by a female neighbor, and the
lineage continues through to Victoria, the child of Daisy's
unwed cousin Beverly, whom Daisy welcomes into her home when
Beverly discovers the pregnancy. Each woman becomes further
and further divorced from the patriarchy, and each becomes
a little more self-actualized. Daisy's young mother realized
her creativity through baking, specifically for her husband.
Daisy's gardening goes beyond the norm (she is described as
"a sensualist when it comes to the world of horticulture")
and nets her a newspaper column. Victoria, as a student at
the University of Toronto in 1977, manages to marry the two
main themes. She works on her master's degree in paleobotany.
More
than being a book about one twentieth century woman, it is
a book about twentieth century women in general. Daisy experiences
just about everything a North American woman could experience
in her time, from being a quiet, submissive wife, raising
children, widowhood, even having a rewarding career that gets
taken away from her by a man. Throughout her life, Daisy's
best friends Bean and Fraidy provide bookends to Daisy's path—Bean
is very traditional and seems to require the attention of
men, while Fraidy is a free spirit who cavorts with artists
and doesn't marry until late in life. Contemporary critics
treated The Stone Diaries as a scrapbook, but it is
actually a literary object lesson in women's history—a
history that, until very recently, women themselves had very
little control over.
But what
makes The Stone Diaries so outstanding is Carol Shields's
remarkable narrative strengths. Characters transform effortlessly,
people's moods are telegraphed with small gestures, and ends
are sometimes left untied but never untidy. Simple people
do monumental things, like building pyramids or leaving husbands
and making new lives. But mostly the book is concerned with
housekeeping and organization—the simple taxonomies that
filled the lives of twentieth century women. Everyone is organizing
something, whether it is a garden or a household or a quarry.
Is a stone more important than a flower? Shields thinks not.
(January,
2009)
|
