Various Miracles by Carol Shields
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve long had Shields’s ‘The Collected Stories‘ on my shelf and truth to tell, I was a bit intimidated by its length. Silly me. On finally starting the tome, I see that it is three short story collections compiled and that I can read one of them at a time! Thus, the first book, ‘Various Miracles’ (preceded by an unpublished short story, ‘Segue’).
It’s interesting to be reminded of Shields’s work. I have read all three novels but long ago, though ‘Unless’ was for many years on my all-time favourite list (though it’s been so many years, I’m not sure whether it still is).
She is a beautiful writer, and in a sophisticated way evokes a light-hearted folksy tone which then jars with the circumstances, and says, I think, that it is actually not jarring at all to live with tragedy, to weather life’s hardest lessons while enjoying moments of humour and grace.
Her stories indicate a love of travel, a love of language (and with various characters who are academics or researchers or writers) and I noted some lovely descriptions of accepting the ageing body. She is aware of the injustices of the world (as in ‘Unless’) but her characters seem to rise above them with wry observation and conversation. A number of stories grab onto a theme and are driven by the theme more than the protagonists or one clear situation: ‘Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls’ is an example of this.
And while it could feel mechanical, this device, I generally noticed it rather than was distracted by it. The final story, ‘Others’, is driven by a device, an annual Christmas letter from near-strangers, and it takes the couple from their honeymoon to a reconciliation after late-in-life marital discord. I was distracted in this story by the idea that this letter would arrive annually, without a return address, to three different residences. but it felt a bit like theatre in the service of the story, like when you watch a play and you know it’s a play with actors, so you wait to see what the playwright has to say. And here, as in other stories (though this is the longest story, I believe, in the collection and my favourite), the humanity is so deep, the gentle assertion about how life is random, mysterious and miraculous, that I did find ‘Various Miracles’ a great pleasure to read.