Abstract
In his Afterword “‘Little Shocks of Recognition’: Carol Shields’s Book Reviews,” Alex Ramon addresses a thus-far neglected aspect of Shields’s non-fiction writing: the book reviews that she produced between the late 1970s and early 2000s. Published initially in academic journals and then in national and international periodicals, as her own literary fame grew, Shields’s reviews constitute a significant part of her non-fiction output, offering a valuable insight into her engagement with the work of her contemporaries and often illuminating the concerns of her own fiction. Opening with an overview of Shields’s reviewing, including her evolving methodology, Ramon’s essay then focuses on Shields’s critiques of three non-fiction texts by American women writers: Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood (1987), Erica Jong’s Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (1994), and Ruby Side Thompson’s diaries, edited and published as Ruby: An Ordinary Woman (1995). Ramon illustrates how Shields’s contrasting responses to these texts illuminate the concerns with the genre of life-writing and the trope of “ordinariness” that permeate her own fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
Shields’s concern about not being tough enough as a reviewer was confided to Howard, in relation to Catherine Schine’s The Love Letter, a novel that Shields confessed to finding “ditzy and dumb” and full of “thudding clichés.” “I ended up writing ‘around’ the book rather than ‘at’ it,” Shields admits. “I seem to lack the courage for demolishment, knowing how it feels I suppose” (Shields in Howard 2007, 319).
- 2.
Carol Shields, “Writing Book Reviews,” Carol Shields Fonds, 1st Accession, Box 62 [n.d., n.p]. Further references to fonds materials are cited in the text as “CSF1.”
- 3.
“I loved your Erica Jong review [and] couldn’t help but think of those critics who accuse you of too much niceness,” writes Blanche Howard to Shields, praising the piece for making its critical points “without ever indulging in the kind of hostility that goes under the name of reviewing. Acerbic but restrained, and subtle” (Howard 2007, 304).
- 4.
In fact, the next instalment of Jong’s memoir, Seducing the Demon: Writing for my Life was published 12 years later, when Jong was age sixty-six. The text was reviewed in The New York Times by Ron Powers in terms that unmistakably echo some of Shields’s remarks about Fear of Fifty. Powers describes the book as a “headlong, disheveled memoir… an honest account of a life lies half-smothered between its pages” (Powers, “How to Save Your Own Life,” New York Times Book Review, April 23, 2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/books/review/how-to-save-your-own-life.html
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Ramon, A. (2023). Afterword: “Little Shocks of Recognition”: Carol Shields’s Book Reviews. In: Stovel, N.F. (eds) Relating Carol Shields’s Essays and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11480-9_13
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