Carol Shields, Happenstance (Flamingo, 1994)

I first discovered Carol Shields, like many people I suspect, through her novel The Stone Diaries, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.  I have a clear memory of reading it on a train to London just after finishing my A-levels, which must date said discovery to 1996.  My copy has my mother's name inscribed in it, which of course means that it's not my copy at all.  A few years ago I went through my bookshelves extracting all the books which belonged to my parents, hauled them down to London on the train and deposited them in the parental sitting room; rather than expressing gratitude at this rendition of their rightful property, my parents looked horrified - their home is already over-crowded with books, and they had probably given up all hope of ever seeing any of these long-forgotten loans (OK, some of them were thefts) again.  The Stone Diaries must have slipped through the net, and the thought of giving it up now is too painful to contemplate.  Such is my love and veneration for Carol Shields, the American-born, Canadian-resident chronicler of the human heart who left a huge hole in the reading lives of millions when she died of breast cancer in 2003.  I say the reading lives, but for me it goes beyond this - her books are a part of me, and I can't think of my life separately from them.  Maybe all passionate readers feel this about a small selection of writers, and Shields is definitely one of them for me.    

I don't think I really fell in love with Shields's work, though, until the summer of 2001, when I read The Republic of Love on holiday in Croatia.  I'm bound to re-read this book at some point while writing this blog, so I won't dwell on it here, except to say that it's one of the very best love stories I've ever read, charting the tangled paths which bring two people together amid the mesh of family, friends, work - in other words amid the densely detailed tapestries of two fully-formed lives - and the joys and troubles that then follow in the attempt to merge those two paths together.  However, on a snowy weekend that quickly turned to slush (this is Manchester, after all) a few weeks ago, on my own - Gregory was in London - and on my sofa, it was an earlier novel, Happenstance, to which I turned in search of the perfect re-read for a gloomy day.

Happenstance was originally published as two books: a novel of the same name came out in 1980, with A Fairly Conventional Woman following in 1982.  Together they chart the events of five days in the lives of a married couple, Jack and Brenda Bowman.  It was the UK publisher Fourth Estate who brought them together in 1991, with a reprint by Flamingo in 1994.  This is the edition I have, and the reader chooses whether to begin at the front or the back, both of which are designed as covers, with Jack's story or Brenda's.  I tend to start with Brenda, since it is her story which touches me the most.

When the novel opens the Bowmans have been married for twenty years.  This is the first important point about Happenstance, and Shields in general: she has made a speciality of writing about long-married couples, and broadly happy ones at that, finding a particularly rich source of material in the measures and manoeuvres by which two people manage to hold a marriage together over many years.  Even in The Republic of Love, which focuses on the early days of a couple's life, Tom and Fay are surrounded by the marriages of others and by their own previous relationships.  Jack and Brenda, then, are bidding each other farewell as Brenda sets off from their hometown of Chicago for a craft convention in Philadelphia.  After years as a wife and mother, Brenda has recently discovered a talent as a quilt-maker, which has grown from a hobby to something approaching a career.  She has begun to sell her quilts, which has in turn justified her taking over a room in the family home as her own.  There are more than a few echoes of Woolf here, and of Shields's description of her own writing: "what you're doing is you're going into a little room and you're shutting the door, and you're sitting there, and that's where you really live".  When I think of Happenstance the image that immediately comes to my mind is of Brenda's workroom, which, we are told, is "the brightest room in the house", three walls painted white and one "a brilliant yellow", with quilts and plants and good places to sit and nurse a cup of coffee.  "It seemed", reflects Brenda, "to have sprung of its own accord out of the cluster of duller rooms [...] to be the room of a much younger family, belonging to more cheerful, more energetic people, people who knew the kind of thing they liked".  Shields writes wonderfully about interiors - this is another reason why I like her so much - and here Brenda's room is quite clearly a symbol of who she is becoming, a vision of the new person she wants to be.  This is not a source of undiluted pleasure to her, however, and much of her stay in Philadelphia among the basket makers and the weavers, not to mention the predominantly male tribe of metallurgists whose conference is taking place in the same hotel, is spent feeling restless and unsatisfied, as if her transition into a person with her own work to do has left her questioning how well she has spent her time so far.

Jack, meanwhile, at home in Chicago, is coping with a string of unforeseen events, mourning his children's metamorphosis into adolescents and coming to terms with the fact that his long-gestated book project, a treatise on Indian trading practices, may never see the light of day.  Jack is a historian, who works at the Great Lakes Institute, mildly baffled by but nonetheless very grateful for the fact that he is paid to spend his days in such a comfortable and undemanding setting.  Trouble has come, however, in the form of a rival publication by his ex-girlfriend Harriet Post which he has seen advertised as forthcoming: Harriet, it would seem, is also planning to bring out a book on Indian trading practices, while his own is still far from finished.  Lacking all spirit for the task, he continues work on chapter six anyway, as his boss has insisted on seeing it on Monday morning.  Just as he is contemplating the pointlessness of the whole project, and sinking into the particular brand of despair known only to academics who cannot bear to read another word of their own prose, his friend Bernie Koltz turns up on his doorstep, slightly drunk and bearing the news that his wife has left him. 

By the time that Brenda returns home, nothing has changed, and yet their marriage is subtly altered by their separate experiences.  The brilliance of this novel is in the way that the accounts of husband and wife reflect and inflect each other, reminding us that making a good marriage is a creative act, but one which always carries within it a certain fragility, no matter how happy or well-matched the participants.  Shields, herself happily married for forty-six years, shows us the mystery at the heart of the union between two people, which has something to do with luck and something to do with faith, and something which lies beyond description.  Brenda remembers a period in her marriage about four years previously, just after the death of her mother, when her love for Jack seemed to have evaporated overnight.   Horrified, she surveys the wreckage of her life, trying to find a way to stagger through it and carry on.  For four months Jack accepts her grief for her mother as an explanation, until one day on holiday in France, as if by some kind of divine grace, she sees again the man she loves.  The marriage is healed, its surface betraying no sign of the cataclysm that has taken place beneath it, and the arc of Jack and Brenda's life as a couple continues.  No unit is invulnerable to the ebb and flow of love over time, Shields suggests, and it is foolish to think otherwise.         

Shields's greatest genius, however, is in her ability to render the ordinary extraordinary, to make the matter of everyday life shine with transcendent beauty.  Her writing simply makes us notice more, be more awake, see things more clearly.  After reading one of her novels the world appears fresher, more dazzling, more remarkable, and I feel a renewed sense of gladness to be in it, and of its infinite possibility.  What more can one ask of a book than that?