Carol Shields
Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields is a character-driven, semi-autobiographical novel depicting the life of Daisy Goodwill. Daisy was born in Manitoba in 1905 and died in Florida in the 1990s. Although the primary focus of the narrative is Daisy, Shields skillfully intertwines Daisy’s story with the stories and interiority of her friends and family. The segue from one character’s story to another is artfully executed.
The narrative alternates between first-person and third-person. It opens with Daisy describing the day of her birth and her mother’s death while giving birth to her. Raised by a neighbor and her son until the age of eleven, Daisy moves back with her father when the neighbor (Aunt Clarentine) dies. Her first marriage to Harold Hoad ends abruptly when Harold falls out of a hotel window in Paris during their honeymoon. Daisy returns home a widow. Several years later, she marries Aunt Clarentine’s son, Barker, with whom she has three children. After Barker’s death, she moves to Florida where she dies.
The shifting points of view portray Daisy as others see her—her friends, family, children, grandchildren, and niece. Occasionally, Daisy speaks for herself. But more often than not, others speak for her or about her or about each other. After her husband’s death, Daisy writes a column as Mrs. Green Thumb for a local paper where we also see her through a series of letters from her editor. She suffers from a severe depression when her employment is terminated. This is followed by a sequence of conflicting views from friends and family as to the cause of her depression. Conflicting views resurface after Daisy’s death in the form of a series of lists itemizing the bland facts of her life.
The novel’s strength lies in many areas. Through its elegant prose and prolific use of detail, Shields immerses the reader in minute details of time, place, and character. Her dazzling display with words captures the essence of a thing or person with layer upon layer of intricate detail, primarily focusing on domesticity. The complex structure, alternating as it does with different voices in the form of letters, diaries, lists, and newspaper entries, allows Shields to leap in time by inserting a brief comment to bridge the intervening years.
What emerges from this complex and arresting novel is a composite, multifaceted portrait of Daisy but one that fails to pin her down definitively. And that may be the point. How others see Daisy—or us—may not be entirely accurate. Just like the novels’ characters, we project on to others our own biases and perspectives and see in them what we are predisposed to see. How we really are may remain a mystery—even to ourselves.
This complex novel is elegantly written, skillfully executed, and highly recommended.