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The Box Garden
1977
Until events run wildly out of hand,
Charleen Forrest manages to cope with the uncertainties
of a failed marriage, trying to live her own life and raise
a son on her frugal income. She is not unaware of the hazards:
"family, banktellers, ex-husband, landladies, bus drivers...
men on the make who want her to lie back and accept (this
is what you need, baby), friends who feel sorry for her."
Her resourcefulness is a delight; her uncanny observations
and surprising irony reveal a witty, wry edge that is apt
to make you laugh out loud.
 Read
an Excerpt
Click
here to read excerpt.
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A shrewd and
skillful storyteller."
- Chicago Tribune
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the book
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in Canada:
Vintage Canada
Amazon.ca
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Buy
in the UK:
Fourth Estate
(see Duet)
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The Box Garden is fun, it
is lively, it has intelligence...What makes [Carol Shields]
special, apart from her slashing wit, her generosity
and her insight into the extraordinariness of ordinary
life, is her formal inventiveness, at once modest and
daring, like a Modernist seamstress."
- Amanda Craig,
Literary Review
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The novel's protagonist...is an
appealing combination of common sense and irrepressible
idealism..."
- Toronto Star
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[Shields] has a lot going for her: wit, perception and
a gentle irony; an impeccable and uncanny ear for dialogue;
and best of all, a sense of language that comes as easily
as breathing."
- Saturday Night
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Her sentences and subjects swerve in a matter of words
from the poetic to the colloquial, uniting the dazzling
and the ordinary, the domestic and the cosmic."
-Joan Barfoot,
London Free Press
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Review
From Publishers Weekly:
Charleen Forrest, Judith Gill's sister (see Small Ceremonies),
is obsessive and hyper-romantic, a poet who no longer
writes because "having given away the well of myself,
there is nowhere to go" except inward. Which is why she
looks for deeper meaning in nylon slips and train berths.
And why, when her lover describes his father's faltering
attempt at sex education ("See The Prairie Lovelies, Only
Twenty-five Cents"), she imagines his family as imbued
with "a sort of decency which surfaces unconsciously."
It's also why she pictures her father's massive heart
attack as "a tidal wave of pressure, a blind wall darkness,
crushing him as he lay sleeping." Today, a doctor would
give Charleen Prozac and send her on her not-so-merry
way. But in 1977, when Shields wrote her second novel
(which, like Small Ceremonies, is making its first U.S.
appearance), the more common treatment for such neuroses
was to endure. Charleen not only endures but comes out
stronger after one especially trying weeklong trip across
Canada to attend her mother's wedding when she is confronted
with more of her past than she, or the reader, expects.
It's the sort of experience that should send her completely
over the edge, but Charleen isn't quite as fragile as
she seems. In less capable hands she'd be a caricature,
her transformation contrived. But Shields makes Charleen
and her experiences believable. Even more rewarding, she
makes them endearing.
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Shields is excellent at capturing
the 'small ceremonies', the special languages, of friendship
and marriage."
- Felicity
James, The Oxonian Review of Books
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...trapped uneasily
between farce and something more sinister, 'The Box
Garden' serves above all as an enlightening expansion
of the dynamics of the McNinn family. It draws a memorable
portrait of a bitter mother and her daughters, and ultimately
grants...the prospect of happiness...In [Shields's]
fictional worlds, despair never triumphs: there is redemption
or resolution or hope for even the sorriest of souls."
(Click
here
to read entire review.)
-
Claire Messud, New York Times
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