Edition: U.S. / Global

Final Chapter

Published: April 14, 2002
(Page 3 of 4)

There were a few rejections at the beginning, but Shields's writing career, too, proceeded with an unusual lack of angst or hardship, especially for someone who could so easily have been dismissed as a scribbling housewife. Her first novel, ''Small Ceremonies,'' was published in 1976, when she was 40. The Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, who later became a friend of Shields's, told me that she knew immediately that it was an ''important'' book: ''You just get that shiver when you come across a real writer, and I had that with her.'' But it wasn't until ''Swann,'' published in 1987, an academic satire about a scholar's quest to establish a woman who wrote ''primitive'' poetry as an overlooked genius, that Shields began to be noticed outside Canada. The novel, which Shields calls her favorite of her books, was picked up by a small British publisher, Fourth Estate, and then published in the United States by Viking. Her next novel, a romantic comedy called ''The Republic of Love,'' did well on both sides of the Atlantic, and some of her earlier books, which had been distributed only in Canada, were republished. Her following grew; Shields's novels were proving to be serious fun, intricate packages that disguised themselves as charming larks.

When ''The Stone Diaries'' won its many prizes, she had just been appointed chancellor at the University of Winnipeg, after having taught literature classes for years at the University of Manitoba, and her days began to be filled with functions and appearances, her phone ringing off the hook with requests for her time. As Shields recalls this period, she seems surprised and amused at the realization that the pressure and stress that came along with all of that was, before the breast cancer, the most difficult thing she had ever gone through.

When the diagnosis came, just before Christmas 1998, she had recently published ''Larry's Party,'' her sly look at ''what life was like for a man in the second half of the 20th century.'' She had also been putting together a collection of short fiction, ''Dressing Up for the Carnival.'' The news left her incredulous. She dropped work on the stories and, reeling from the mastectomy, spent a month ''just crying on the sofa,'' repeating to herself ''I have breast cancer'' in order to make the reality sink in. Finally, facing various deadlines, including one for a short biography of Jane Austen for the Penguin Lives Series, she got back to work -- in the midst of her first round of chemotherapy.

Throughout her career, Shields often wrote about bleak subjects, yet she was never seen as a writer with a dark side. Something about Shields's deft way of handling even the most depressing material -- in ''The Stone Diaries,'' for instance, there's the death in childbirth of Daisy Goodwill's mother, then the accidental death of Daisy's new husband, who has turned out to be a raging alcoholic, and finally Daisy's own death, alone in a Florida nursing home -- can leave an improbably buoyant impression. When critics have found fault with her writing, they have accused her of excessive whimsy. Margaret Atwood, another Canadian novelist, whom Shields counts among her friends, says that the gravity of Shields's fiction has not been properly understood. ''Because she's a comic writer and genuinely funny, early on, she was put in the 'sweet' box, where she does not belong,'' Atwood told me. ''The fact is, there's a dark thread in everything she writes.''

In person, as well, her generous spirit and genial warmth can obscure her more complicated depths. Shields's British editor, Christopher Potter, said in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary about Shields: ''She is good, without necessarily being nice. She can be quite severe about people, and very funny about them.'' If you're not paying attention, Shields's occasional ''not niceness'' can sail right over your head. For instance, when I asked Shields if she had ever been through a depression, she replied that she had not and that while she knows how nightmarish it can be, on some level she fails to comprehend it. It took me an extra second to register the bite in her next comment, delivered in that crystalline voice. ''Now, I hear about depressed women,'' she says, ''and I think: You have two breasts! How can you be depressed?''

Working on ''Unless'' was Shields's first time writing from the other side of happiness and security, and she wanted the book to reflect her hard-earned new understanding of the fragility of happiness. Potter told me that he gave her an assignment that would help make the book's darker aspects emerge: ''I said she had to create one thoroughly bad, unlikable character.'' Shields agreed, though she did it with a playful tweak: she gave Reta a pushy, egotistical book editor who pressures her into showing him a half-completed manuscript, which he then tears apart. She also has Reta embark on an imaginary letter-writing campaign intended to take down a notch all the male writers she comes across who, when they discourse pompously on literature, don't acknowledge the existence of female writers. Yet Shields was determined not to err on the side of grandiosity. ''I wanted to address the inequalities between men and women that I think are central to all our problems in the world -- but I didn't feel I had to solve them,'' she says.