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.
I like the sound of this. I have not tried Carol Shield’s before; thanks for another tempting review!
Thanks Sarah! The good thing about Shields is that you’ll find her books (at least three of them) in every charity shop in the country.
Thanks for that hint – now I know I shall enjoy looking for her in the second hand shops.
Thank you for this insightful and intriguing review. If only you had posted it a day earlier before I had put a good copy of the book back on the shelf of a charity shop in Barmouth and decided I didn’t really need to read it. For the sake of balance I should admit that I had already got six other books including Saplings by Noel Streatfield, Emily’s Quest by L M Montgomery, and Louder and Funnier by P G Wodehouse (1933 copy). A case of bibliodipity as Robin Once would say.
Luckily her books are in a lot of charity shops, so next time you can grab it! But those books sound great – not a Wodehouse I’ve heard of.
After reading your review I now understand why you called the author “Canadian literary royalty.” It is shameful to live in the US and share a border wtih Canada and yet I have to struggle to name more than Lucy Maud Montgomery and Louise Penny as Canadian authors. This sounds like a treat.
I majored in literature at a US university and I don’t think I was asked to read more than a couple of Canadian writers (Farley Mowat and Robertson Davies, I think). I only discovered Canada’s wealth of wonderful writers later! (I also love their films and shows.)
I fervently recommend Mary Lawson, who has also been reviewed in this blog. Also, Alice Munro, who wrote short stories, And of course Margaret Atwood.
Stephen Leacock was my introduction to Canadian writers, but now I’d agree that Munro and Lawson are up there with my faves.
I am a bit in love with Canada, so finding a Canadian author is always more likely to make me pick them up!
Exactly so. I read it not long after it came out, and I couldn’t remember a thing about the plot when reading your excellent review, but I remember the sense of wonder that there could be writing like that.
It’s interesting to compare our responses to books written and read decades ago, with our responses to books written back then but read now with many years of reading experience behind us. I dug out my reading journal from 1997 and found that I had written a fair bit about the plot but also about my own emotional response to the story. In those early days of keeping a reading journal I often wrote mostly about the plot, but with this novel I wrote about reading with a sense of fear gnawing away about the fate of one of the characters, and then the sense of powerful loss that I felt when she died.
I didn’t write enough about the writing, but I noted the vivid metaphors for the life of hardship that women lived.
That’s so interesting, Lisa – keeping a record of the emotional response is (to me) so much more captivating than the sort of summary you could find on Wikipedia etc.
I hope you read some of her other novel too. I liked them all.
I did not know what a Malvern pudding was, so I looked it up and the Wiki said it was listed in 2010 as one of the ten most “threatened puddings” after a survey conducted by UKTV Food. That made me smile. Threatened Puddings is my new band name.
Threatened Puddings! That’s brilliant.
Thank you so much for writing this excellent review of The Stone Diaries, Simon. It’s a novel that gains impact through each rereading. I know you didn’t like the ‘gimmick’ of the photos but it’s interesting that there is no photo of Daisy. This is another telling feature of so many women’s lives. Their lives about the nurture and support of others, not about themselves.
Oops: last sentence should read: “Their lives are often about the nurture and support of others, not about themselves.”
Ah yes, really good point about the missing Daisy photo. I’d forgotten that, or maybe hadn’t spotted it.
I didn’t know Carol Shields, or her novels, but I enjoyed reading your review, thank you for sharing it. Bonus for me is that it turns out my local library (I don’t live in an English-speaking country) has a copy of The Stone Diaries, which I’ll take out next time.
Ah perfect! Hurrah for libraries.
This is how I felt about Larry’s Party, too, the plot was secondary, but it was a whole life and world in a book. I really do have to get to this one.
Good to know Larry’s Party is similarly great – and it’s everywhere in charity shops etc here, which is handy
I have this book. It is my TBR since December and I think I will read it soon as you gave a good review. Thank you, Simon.
Great, Claudia, really hope you like it as much as I did.
I read this book about a decade ago and really liked it. There is something about Daisy and her life that touches all of us.
Here is my review:
https://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/shields-carol-stone-diaries.html
Thanks for the link!
You’re welcome.
I read this about 20 years ago and you’ve definitely encouraged me to a re-read. I really liked it then, but I think I’d get more from it now I’m older.
I definitely think it’s one where a maturer reader will get even more – I’ll have to reread in my dotage!
After I read and adored Shields’ The Republic of Love in 2022, I was so excited to read more…and then, aside from starting and abandoning a couple of disappointing earlier books, did not. But I know have this and Larry’s Party and Unless awaiting me and do look forward to getting back to her. (As I also look forward to you one day returning to Canada!)
It does seem to be just this, Unless and Larry’s Party that are everywhere in the UK – I’ve never seen others around, but will keep an eye out for The Republic of Love. (And already planning a return trip, though goodness knows when.)
I love Carol Shields from start to stop. Even her very early works raise very interesting ideas about how we think about the shape of a life, how we tell ourselves stories and tell stories about ourselves to other people, to cope with disappointments and sorrows, and celebrate small pleasures and joys. The photographs aren’t indulgent when you think about the idea that, even there, she is playing with how we contemplate what is real and what is invented; some of the photos are her own (reminding us that she is inserting herself into the story as its teller, which every author does, to some extent) but I believe that i read somewhere that others were “found photographs” which I imagine emerged in bookstore crawls, in those cabinets and drawers near the cash where old postcards and paper bits and bobs live (that mostly bibliophiles overlook cuz we’re obsessing over the shelved items). But even those found photos have “real” stories behind them, they’re simply unknown out of context. Anyway, it’s been years since I reread this but I regularly return to her work, and even though it seems very simple it’s like a series of mirrors once you peer more closely. I hope you find other books of hers and all the better if it means that you must return to Canada! :)