A family and its good fortune
Anita Brookner
THE STONE DIARIES by Carol Shields Fourth Estate, f12.99, pp.361 have said that Mrs Flett recovered from the nervous torment she suffered some years ago, and yet a kind of rancour underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one.' This marvel- lous sentence is extracted at random from Carol Shields's account of an unremark- able life, one which will fill her readers with amazed gratitude for a novel which fulfils its promise to the very end, and, more, one which will put them in mind of a more established social order, now appar- ently lost, in which there was an element of honour in upward mobility, and in which all ends happily, or at least as happily as final dissolution will allow.
`Feisty' say the nurses admiringly in the Canary Palms Convalescent Home, but Mrs Flett, born Daisy Goodwill, is ordinary in every particular except her birth, which occurred in the kitchen of her parents' home at Grange Road, Tyndall, Manitoba, one very hot summer afternoon. Her moth- er had not known she was pregnant, and died, presumably of shock, minutes after the birth. The father, Cuyler Goodwill, who worked at the local stone quarry and had a gift for carving which was later to make. him a renowned figure in the larger Ameri- ca to which he emigrated, was unable to care for the child, and handed her over to a neighbour, Mrs Clarentine Flett (`Aunt Clarentine') to be brought up.
The child came to no harm: no Freudian nightmares attended her, apart from the unavoidable sensation of solitude which fil- tered through as the years advanced. Indeed, what is remarkable about this nar- rative is that all the characters do well for themselves. Aunt Clarentine leaves her husband, moves in with her son Barker in Winnipeg, and starts a cut flower enter- prise which flourishes. The illiterate Jewish pedlar who happened to be passing when the child was about to be born, and who pressed a foreign coin on the minutes'-old infant's forehead, summons up the courage to request a loan from the bank and ends up a millionaire with a network of hard- ware shops. Cuyler Goodwill, on the strength of a strange drystone tower he has built as a memorial to his wife, is headhunted by an international limestone concern in Bloomington, Indiana. Barker Flett, whom Daisy Flett knew as a child, and whom she subsequently marries, rises to a senior post in agricultural research. Somewhere along the way Daisy manages a contented life as a wife, mother, gardening correspondent for the local paper, and finally blue-rinsed bridgeplayer in Sarasota, Florida. There is of course that bleak insight which visited her unannounced some time in her later years and is still there — but it is almost a comfort now as she lies dying.
I restrain myself from filling in the abun- dant details of this exemplary story (there is a formidable family tree served up, as if this were the Forsythe Saga) because the details are not allowed to encroach on the main thrust of the narrative, which is seam- lessly developed. But there is one authorial addition which will be eagerly appropriated by many women writers compelled to make a fiction out of their autobiography, although as a genre this may well be out of date. I refer to the inclusion of a set of photographs, all suitably aged, and pur- porting to be of the characters in the novel. These look authentic, save for one instance, and one wonders whether the account might not be a true family history, until one reflects that Carol Shields, who can teach her younger sisters a thing or two, has probably acquired the pho- tographs first — a job lot? — and con- structed her novel around them. Whatever the genesis of the story, the photographs add potency to what is already a poignant mix of fact and fantasy.
Here is grim Hannah Goodwill, the graceless mother of Cuyler Goodwill, who put her savings in a jam jar, where the dollar bills grew soft and limp. Here is a flirtatious Aunt Clarentine, surely taken from one of the sentimental postcards that were amorous currency in 1916. Barker, with his loosely knotted tie, stares fixedly into space, while Mrs Flett's friend, Elfreda (`Fraidy) Hoyt, smiles invitingly through her kiss-curls. Various toddlers and adoles- cents, brought unerringly up to date, repre- sent Mrs Flett's grandchildren, not all of whom figure in the story. This innocent device, unsignalled in the text, connects with everyone's recall of half-forgotten faces, perhaps unrecognised in old family albums, and resurrected only by the names inscribed beneath the photographs, per- haps by a hand consigned to memory, itself half forgotten. This is principally a novel with an appeal to women readers, but of an altogether superior kind. It is also a novel about the acquisition of language. Cuyler Goodwill discovers language when making love to his wife, Daisy Flett through writing her gardening column, Magnus Flett (Aunt Clarentine's deserted husband) through reading Jane Eyre. Barker Flett, in his last letter to his wife, becomes eloquent only when dying. There is a dignity here which is unusual in these ruffianly times. There is also an optimism (all those millionaires). I found my response softening as I read on, although the leitmotif — the stone of the title, the limestone of the quarries — is a hard one. If durability is what finally counts in Mrs Flett's life it is also a quality which attaches to the novel itself. An impeccable performance.
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