When I was in Canada last year (how I miss it and how I want to return!), I met up with Debra and she very kindly gave me a copy of The Stone Diaries (1993) by Canadian literary royalty Carol Shields. I was familiar with Shields but had never read her, and didn’t really know what to expect. As luck would have it, 1993 was proving a tricky year to fill for A Century of Books – and it was very useful to have The Stone Diaries on hand. And what an unusual, and unusually good, book it is.
Towards the end of the novel, its heroine Daisy reflects:
All she’s trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they’re like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. At the same time she knows that what lies ahead of her must be concluded by the efforts of her imagination and not by the straight-faced recital of a thottled and unlit history. Words are more and more required. And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone — anyone — to listen.
It’s a good question: what is the story of a life? In some ways, Shields’ approach to the question is conventional. The Stone Diaries follows the life of a fairly ordinary Canadian woman from birth through to her death as an octogenarian. The sections are called things like ‘childhood’, ‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’ and so on. Daisy falls in love (not necessarily with the man she marries); she has friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Her one brush with the something that threatens to be extraordinary is becoming a popular gardening columnist, but she doesn’t truly become a celebrity. She has children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is an ordinary life, well-lived.
But The Stone Diaries is not an ordinary novel. Here’s how it starts:
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 currents, and Cuyler (my father) being a dainty eater. A pick-and-nibble fellow she calls him, able to take his food or leave it.
You can quickly tell that this is no ordinary narrator. This section is in the first-person – but telling us about an event she can’t have witnessed, down to the detail of the recipe. Throughout the novel, the narrative chops and changes between the third-person and the first-person – sometimes taking us into Daisy’s eyes and sometimes looking at her from a distance. It swirls between the two without pause, giving us a sense of the panoramic.
Add to this that the storytelling sometimes comes with preternatural knowledge, and sometimes more as you’d expect from the more off-the-shelf Bildungsroman. And then there’s a chapter entirely in letters, and another on different characters’ perspectives on what happened to Daisy. In the hands of most authors, this mix could be an awkward technique – but Shields wields it expertly. The tone and the narrative approach really elevate The Stone Diaries above the ordinary. It is handled with such assurance, which is perhaps no surprise as Shields was almost two decades into a revered career. More to the point, it never reads pretentiously – The Stone Diaries manages that exceptional feat: being both narrative experiment and page-turner. I think the only element that didn’t work for me was the inclusion of photographs of the characters, which felt a little bit self-indulgent.
I haven’t told you much about the other characters or the plot, but to be honest they are secondary to the prose and the confidence of the storytelling. You may end up not remembering all the grandchildren, or even quite disentangling the complexities of Daisy’s father, adoptive parents, relatives, lovers and so forth. But you’ll remember how different the novel felt, and how powerfully you are enveloped into one woman’s life.