Collected Stories

Starred review from January 24, 2005
Shields, who died in 2003, was best known for her novels (The Stone Diaries
; Unless
), though she published three collections of stories over as many decades, here elegantly gathered and introduced by fellow Canadian and friend Margaret Atwood. Appearing first is her last unpublished tale, "Segue," about an aging couple in failing health—he a famous novelist, she a writer of sonnets—who grow apart as they take "responsibility for own dying bodies." The story serves as a poignant tribute. Overall, Shields's touch is gorgeously light, her tales capturing brief, evanescent moments in the busy lives of couples, mothers and lonely wives. If a few entries seem too brief or lack development, "Hazel" (from The Orange Fish
) demonstrates all the elements of Shields's mastery: an ordinary widow, perhaps too polite for her own good, finds a satisfying job as an itinerant kitchen demonstrator and discovers that her timidity and self-effacement can actually be turned to her advantage. From the same collection, the story "Collision" draws on Shields's extended travels and is set in a "small ellipsoid state in eastern Europe," where two lonely people of exotically different background and language collide on a rainy night; the story pursues a separate "biography" of each of the lovers with "every narrative scrap... equally honored." In "Edith-Esther," a story from Shields's last collection, the author prophetically portrays the eponymous protagonist, an 80-year-old novelist, as a "rare bird," pestered by her biographer for "some spiritual breeze" he can put into his book about her. She resists, but the biographer reworks her life the way he wants and in the end, to her dismay, refashions her work as uplifting—the last thing she intended it to be. Uplifting or not, this is a volume full of grace and wisdom. (Feb.)

Correction:
The literary agents for Diane Chamberlain's The Bay at Midnight
(Forecasts, Jan. 10) are Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Tracy Fisher at the William Morris Agency.

October 2, 1996
Taken individually, the stories in this collection are searing and dead-on. Taken collectively, they render Sillitoe's pessimism and vitriol hard to take. Whether his focus is on Britain's upper or lower classes, Sillitoe peoples his tales with bitter, streetwise, disillusioned souls who are scrappy enough to go on fighting their daily battles but too drained to realize their dreams. The young speaker of Sillitoe's most famous story, "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," voices one of the collection's leitmotifs when he describes the local gentry as being "dead": though he resents the rich, the only way this juvenile delinquent knows how to succeed as an adult is as a thief. In Sillitoe's world, education offers no redemption: the main character in "Mr. Raynor the School Teacher" is a voyeur who engages in near-masturbatory fantasies while he lectures before a class. When Raynor learns that a girl he used to ogle was brutally murdered by her boyfriend, he never realizes that his own selfish desires and sadistic treatment of his students may have set the stage for her death. Characters often engage in fantasies, as in "The Chiker," a portrait of another Peeping Tom. Perhaps due to the rigidity of England's class structure and his own apathy, the character is incapable of changing his life: he is as trapped as his pet canary. Marriage, as portrayed in "The Magic Box" and "Fishing Boat Picture," forms another bar of the cage: in the former, infidelity and bastard children notwithstanding, a couple inexplicably remain together; in the latter, a wife's dissatisfaction with her husband's lack of affection inadvertently leads to her own emotional isolation and death. Only the strongest-hearted or most devoted fans should read all the way through. Others should dip in whenever they feel like reading the blues.