The Allures of Form

...As a consequence, the family flees England for Canada...

...In a handful of stories, the window is too narrow, the narrative simply an elaboration of a conceit, the vital material too thinly spread...

...In "Weather," the National Association of Meteorologists goes on strike and all weather stops...

...On her honeymoon somewhere "in the middle of France," her drunk husband falls out of an open hotel window before her very eyes while tossing coins to the children below...

...Honesty, grace, et al...

...Her mother dies, so obese and innocent that she's been unaware of her pregnancy...

...Inquiries into the nature and making of art are the other passionate preoccupations of Dressing Up for the Carnival, from the large metaphor of a betterthan-real window, down to the minuscule matter of a broken letter, the "i" on a computer keyboard, that plagues the writernarator of "Absence...

...How can she write her intended story without "the very letter that attaches to the hungry self...

...As in Shields' novels, anatomies of marriages abound...

...Various Miracles [1989] and The Orange Fish [1992...

...They can never utter (or forget) the word "beans...

...It's this little subjunctive cottage by the side of the road...

...Frustrated after hours of effort, deprived of the first person pronoun, the gerund, the most common verb, she persists, the absence becoming a challenge like the restrictions of a sonnet or a Rothko palette: "The broken key seemed to demand of her a parallel surrender, a correspondence of economy subtracted from the alphabet of her very self...

...A narrative isn't something you pull along like a toy train, a perpetually thrusting indicative," one character (a literary critic) declares...

...her imagination is too fertile...

...But she is the author of eight earlier novels, and is a poet and playwright as well...

...Occasionally the reader gets attached to the characters only to find they are being deployed as mere illustration...

...Some of the stories in Dressing Up for the Carnival are too ephemeral, but in the end the collection is greater than the sum of its parts...

...Shields' work is "brilliant and subdued at the same time, finely made, but with a secure sense of its own shape...

...Shields is purposely subverting expectation...

...Everything is coming out these days for the pleasures of ordinary existence...

...Neither husband is much missed...

...The spirit of making do transcends the quotidian in "Windows...

...Like the scarf her heroine chooses—practically invents— for her daughter...

...Happenstance (1994), is presented from both a wife's and husband's viewpoint, and has to be turned upside down halfway through...

...has renounced everything...

...Absence gestures at meaning...

...About half the main characters in the collection are artists or writers, which can grow claustrophobic...

...A hypersubtle sensibility is something of great value too...

...To live frictionlessly in the world," notes a character in the new story collection, "is to understand the real grief of empty space...

...The friend takes possession of the daughter's scarf, leaving the shopper emptyhanded...

...The event that has registered for Daisy, deeply and perpetually, is her unexpected birth on a kitchen couch...

...are often ascribed to able women writers, as are the other virtues of The Stone Diaries that were hailed: generosity of spirit, acuteness of observation, elegance of execution...

...Such generic praise might have suited Shields' early works, which are pleasing yet not especially distinctive or profound...

...Sounds cozy, but it's not: "They still apprehend each other as strangers...

...they are altogether something else, more delicate and subtle, more rooted in ideas than in character (unlike her previous fairly conventional collections...

...Beyond relief, it yields an esthetic...

...Over the years this renunciation hasanunintendedresult:Mirrorless, they finally see themselves behind each other's faces...

...This becomes the salient image for a difficult, sometimes arid marriage, but one that intermittently clicks back into connection, the partners as relieved and grateful as they are for the resumption of wind and storms...

...It shows a writer who has evolved from competence to mastery, whose imagination is always in search mode, who can transformher "subjunctive cottages" into labyrinthine castles...

...To read her is to encounter a restive, experimental writer, one for whom the allures of form are paramount...

...A good number are finely wrought excursions along a path of metaphorical inquiry—into the meaning of keys, or the difference between invention and interpretation (that is, between artist and critic), or the emotional reverberations of weather...

...The quotidian is where it's at,'" she announces, citing an imaginary syndicated columnist (and maybe taking a poke at narrow readings of her own books...

...You invented it, created it out of your imagination.'" Heartwarming, yes, but hardly the last word...

...Solidity, presence...

...Like some pan-allergic people, she can't abide any sensory stimuli, down to "the shape of a spoon in her mouth...

...Shields certainly cannot be described as a minimalist...

...An envious friend fingers the treasured scarf and says, '"Finding it, it's almost like you made it...

...A Celibate Season (1991), written with Blanche Howard, is an epistolary novel...

...Given the success of The Stone Diaries, it seems disingenuous to claim that Carol Shields—praised for her "honesty," "grace," "humor," and "depth"—is underappreciated...

...THE STORIES in Dressing Up For the Carnival do not have the specific gravity of Shields' novels...

...Another deprivation, another absence: "Not one of us was going to get what we wanted...

...A doorway is privileged over an actual door in its usefulness and even its beauty—to give a homely example...

...In it, before hero Larry's birth, his British mother unwittingly causes her mother-in-law's death by botulism, having served her home preserved and inadequately sealed green beans...

...Later she marries a man 23 years her senior and passes two mild decades until his death...

...In fact, it has undergone such a sea change that the benign terms no longer sufficiently or specifically describe what is found on the page...

...It wanders lightheartedly from an account of the invention of the steering wheel muff (by a woman pained to see her husband's hands chilling on the wheel), to a medieval monk's invention of the space between words, to the invention of the hyphen, and culminates with an ancient Greek shepherd boy: Driven by boredom on the job, he discovers that he can dream by day, eyes wide open, as well as by night...

...In her own parallel surrender, Shields writes the three-and-a-half page story without using an "i," an unobtrusive feat that would have been too clever had it gone on any longer...

...But at their best, they are virtuoso performances, the sort of thing a writer can risk only when she is fully at ease with her craft...

...The marriage is unconsummated—he's been drunk and possibly uninterested all week...

...We were suddenly without seasonal zest," says the wife, "without hourly variation, without surprise and complaint, dislocated in time and space...

...Larry's Party (1998), the wonderfully eccentric novel that came after The Stone Diaries, was received in the spirit of bland respect that commonly follows a triumph...

...Sometimes you might arrive and find the door ajar...

...It was the desire to please someone fully, even one's self...

...THE QUEEN of a mythical realm in "Stop...

...Yet her fiction isn't discussed with the reverence accorded to her widely known compatriots, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood or Robertson Davies...

...You have chanced upon something of great value,' his mother says...

...The author's ability to present such bizarre incidents with cool humor only sharpens their terror...

...but in sinuous, ephemeral form...

...Emptiness has weight," one narrator remarks...

...The final section of Swann (1987), about four critics' discovery of a great unknown poet, purports to be the script of a film made at a literary symposium (the very notion provokes levity...

...When the government imposes a window tax, forcing people to board up their sources of light and vision, two painters whose love and work are threatened paint a window over their boarded-up one...

...The first marriage of Daisy Goodwill, orphaned heroine of The Stone Diaries, lasts all of eight days...

...But her fiction has steadily gained in allusive richness and force...

...Yet another writer-propagandist, bumbling her way through abooktourin"The Scarf," discovers that even shopping for her daughter, if done properly, can become an art form...

...In "Keys," a lonely character is "seized by an impulse to purify her life" and begins throwing her possessions out the window...

...The world of her last two novels, and even more of her new short stories...

...Beneath the limpid surface, the animating vision is hardly benign...

...But she thinks in terms of technical and emotional economies...

...they barely registered...

...Not real light, of course, but the idea of light—infinitely more alluring than light itself...

...Unable to bear time itself, "she no longer speaks or thinks, since the positioning of noun and verb, of premise and conclusion, demands a progression that invites that toxic essence, that mystery...

...Carol Shields, who has lived in Winnipeg for many years, is known to American readers for her 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diaries...

...But while the novels generally adhere to the rigors of realism, the stories explode with fantasy and whimsy...

...All you have to do is open the door and walk in...

...Reviewed by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Author, "In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy," and "Faceto Face" A spotlight on one book, however well-deserved, can cast the rest of a writer's work into shadow...

...Beneath the therapeutic soup making and embroidery and hot baths in "Soup du Jour," though, is the determined denial of a volatile affair, an unacknowledged child and exile...

...Daisy is left unmoored in the world...

...A pervasive theme of Dressing Up for the Carnival is deprivation—selective, often voluntary, sometimes imposed...

...Other times you crawl in through a window...

...Nothing that happens later can allay that stern fact...

...The married couple in "Mirrors" decide to do without mirrors in their summer house, a "curious strand of asceticism...

...But she can't escape the rhythmic beating of her own heart, "insisting on its literal dance.' Since life does insist on going on, a more practical response to deprivation is making do, a strategy that Shields' novels examine at philosophical leisure and the stories treat swiftly—with a calligrapher's pen as opposed to the muralist's brush...

...So a witty, circuitous story called "Invention," about the genesis of art, is a salutary change...

...It deserved better...

...Larry becomes a builder of ever more complex garden mazes, a metaphor for a life shaped, like most lives, by wrong turns and arbitrary choices, the frivolity of coincidence, the benighted promptings of will and destiny...

...a window that had become more than a window, better than a window, the window that would rest in the folds of the mind as all that was ideal and desirable in the opening, beckoning, sensuous world...

...Although, come to think of it, the French novelist Georges Perec wrote an entire novel, A Void, without the more common "e...

...Dressing Up for the Carnival, is unsettling, perilous and passing strange...

...daydream,' his father says, full of wonder...