I first discovered Carol Shields when her The Stone Diaries was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993. Before that she hadn’t been published much in Britain. I then went on to read most of her backlist as the titles appeared in bookshops because I was hooked. Her prose ripples, her characters are richly recognisable and genuine, and her narratives are compelling. Sadly that year’s Booker went to Roddy Doyle for Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha but Shields did win the Pulitzer Prize.
Small Ceremonies, a first person narrative, was her first published novel (1976) which appeared in the UK in 1995. An Illinois-born, naturalised Canadian, university teacher and mother of five children, she was 37 when she wrote it.
She certainly knew all about female juggling. Judith Gill, the protagonist of Small Ceremonies is the wife of an English academic, and she’s an author. The English department in which her husband works, the parties they go to and give and the people they know all ring resoundingly true. So do the meals she cooks and the two teenage children she adores but sometimes struggles to understand. Everything she describes is beautifully observed.
Of course this title is over half a century old now so you have to read it as you do fiction from a former age and accept that ideas have changed about what it is acceptable to say or even think. I winced – and then reprimanded myself – at Judith’s being thankful that she hadn’t had to raise a “mongoloid” and that’s just an example. The same applies of course to, say, Jane Austen (who, incidentally and unsurprisingly, Shields read extensively). You just have to get into the right mindset.
Most of the people Judith and her husband know are writers of one sort and another, and oddly, this is the second book about writers I’ve read in a week. The other was Amanda Craig’s enjoyable new book High and Low. In both cases one is led to consider the issues and angsts which writers face and they resonate with me for obvious reasons.
One of Shields’s main themes in Small Ceremonies is plagiarism. What is it and how much does it matter? Judith has borrowed (appropriated? stolen? the plot of an unpublished novel she secretly read while staying with her family in another writer’s home for a year in England. She then abandons her own novel but not before she has shown it to another novelist – whose next novel … well you can guess. It’s fascinating stuff because of the three she is the only one aware of what has happened. Neither of the others has noticed.
We all know the theory that there are seven stories in the world which are the backbone of all fiction. Years ago I read most of Noel Barber’s entertaining books. He’d been a foreign correspondent and used his experience to tell the thwarted love Romeo and Juliet story in various settings and situations across the world. I wonder if he was aware that was what he was doing? To this day I like to relax occasionally with the feel-good novels of Katie Fforde. She usually retells Jane Eyre spliced with Pride and Prejudice (rags to riches) in lots of different modern settings – and it works nicely.
And I speak as someone who has recently published a book of short stories each of which is predicated on a character from a great work of literature. They’re not my characters. I’ve borrowed them.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unheard-Voices-Tales-Margins-Literature-ebook/dp/B0FWZQ8YRT
Plagiarism? Definitely not, not least because I am completely up front about what I’m doing. I regard it as form of literary homage/criticism. I’m working on a second set.
Carol Shields died in 2003 at age 68 having, the previous year, again been been Booker-shortlisted for Unless which was her last novel. Small Ceremonies has sat on one of my shelves since the mid-90s when I first read it. I now realise that it’s a “companion novel” to her The Box Garden (1977) which I’ve never read. Of course I now have it and it’s near the top of my TBR list.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:
