Carol Shields - The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

INTRODUCTION

The best fiction surprisesand withholds. Each time that I read The Stone Diaries I see it differently. It is a story, first of allthe story of a woman, Daisy Goodwill, later Daisy Goodwill Flett. It is also many storiesthose of her family and her friends. You read it first as such, drawn in at once by the compelling opening pages, and then keen to know what is going to happento Daisy, to the rest of them. Subsequently it becomes a view of how one womanmany womenlived in the twentieth century, what they expected and what was expected of them. It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidencethe way in which there is no single truth about anyones life, but as many truths as there are observers.

And if you are interested in how a novel is made, it turns into an exercise in narrative technique. And, perhaps, airilya demonstration of how a novelist can successfully juggle a cast of twenty characters and more over time and space without bewildering the reader.

Here is a story that opens in Manitoba in 1905 and ends in Florida in the 1990s. From birth to deaththe parabola of a life, a North American life, with brief excursions to France, to Orkney. Daisy is born into a world that has known neither of the world wars, and in which a woman is required to be first and foremost a domestic support system. She leaves another one in which the globe has contracted and women expect to work outside the home. Her father-in-law sails the Atlantic as a young immigrant from Orkney: At the end of the century Daisy will fly the ocean to trace him. She has experienced the century in a temporal sense, but, as we learn in one of the novels deft commentaries, she has never known nude bathing, pierced ears, body massage, and much else that could be seen to characterize the age. Born in "the murderously hot back kitchen" of a Manitoba stone-workers home, she will spend her last years in a three-bedroom Florida condo, a Florida bluehead in a turquoise pantsuit.

Kitchens are rich with significance in the novelkitchens and what is done in them. The vivid opening chapter has the kitchen as the scene of both birth and death, with the Malvern pudding that Daisys mother, Mercy, is cooking as an emblem of domestic labor and achievementthe thickly cut bread, the oozing fruit juices, the sugar. Many years later, Daisy prepares supper for her familyhusband, three childrenin an Ottawa kitchen (summer heat once more, so a cold meal): jellied veal loaf, sliced tomatoes, potato salad, raspberries again, but in little glass bowls. There is care and attention: the formality of a tablecloth, and before her husbands return from work Daisy "fixes" herselfhousedress off, fresh clothes, earrings, lipstick. We are told that Daisy desiresdeeply, fervently, sincerelyto be a good wife and mother. She is an assiduous reader of womens magazines, in support of this ambition. In one of the novels many significant asideshow others see Daisywe are given the possible contrasting reactions of a visiting friend of her girlhood, Fraidy Hoyt, herself unmarried and childless. She is perhaps grimly enviousof the distinguished husband, the big house, the beautiful children; or, is she pityingly contemptuous of this woman drowning in domesticity, child-ridden, who probably hasnt read a book in ten years?

Teasingly, we are not told which view Fraidy holds, but this is 1947, and it is tempting to see Fraidy as the voice of the future, ahead of her day, already with the assumptions of the postfeminist woman.

Throughout the novel, the authorial voice alternates with those other voices, creating a deliberate ambiguity. We know what happens to Daisy, and frequently she speaks for herself, but we see her also as others see her, and no two people see her in the same way. Was she happy as a domestic goddess? Maybe not, for in the next, and crucial section of the booksignificantly called "Work, 19551964"she is shown, entirely obliquely, through a sequence of letters written by others, as immersed in a new role as Mrs. Green Thumb, gardening correspondent for the local paper, and eventually devastated and plunged into a lengthy episode of depression when she gets the sack. So was domestic life not work? This section is one of the most powerful in the novelclever and funnyand it gives much pause for thought, as we see Daisys life of that time shimmer behind the words of other people, and it becomes clear that this is the point at which Daisy has achieved some kind of fulfillment and discovers in herself a capacity of which she had been unaware. She strove to be a good wife and mother, but was she in fact stifled by that role?