The collected contents of the late (1935–2003) Canadian author’s three published story volumes.
Various Miracles (1985) showcases Shields’s affectionate scrutiny of marital and familial experience, in deft portrayals of a woman’s life understood by assembling random “Scenes,” a violinist who escapes through music her family’s claustrophobic embrace (“A Wood”), a lengthy friendship traced through exchanged Christmas card messages (“Others”) and a house-hunting couple’s willed flight from the memory of a child’s death (“Fragility”). The Orange Fish (1989) focuses mostly on women’s imaginative responses to quotidian dilemmas, notably in the tale of a middle-aged couple’s Parisian second honeymoon (“Hinterland”), which brings them separate visions of their individual and shared vulnerability and mortality. Shields’s fondness for fabulism (“The Harp”) and explorations of writers’ lives dominates Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000), distinguished chiefly by revelations of how significant meanings inhere in mundane things (the title piece, “Soup du Jour”), and by the comic tale of a resolute nudist (“Dressing Down”): a rich story displaying the rangy inventiveness more prominent in her popular novels (the 1995 Pulitzer Prize–winning Stone Diaries, etc.).
Shields the storyteller is a somewhat lesser writer, but she’s always worth reading.
