Various Miracles

On plot struggles, happenstance, enigmas, mysteries, and matches struck unexpectedly in the dark

Content warning: suicide

I am rereading Carol Shields’s fiction in order, and have discerned, five books in, that it was on her third novel, Happenstance (1980), that she emerged as a writer in full command of her craft and her vision. Her first two books are good, but they are also tentative, they are trying to be, whereas Happenstance just is, which is especially remarkable because it’s a novel whose protagonist espouses a worldview wholly counter to the Shieldsian.

Happenstance is the story of Jack Bowman, who sees the world as best understood through grand theories and overarching narratives, until the week his wife goes out of town and (possibly not unrelated) suddenly everything he ever believed in might not be true anymore. His best friend turns up on his doorstep heartbroken, his next-door neighbour attempts suicide, his children are acting peculiar, and he’s beginning to realize that the book he’s been writing for the last decade might be a worthless pursuit.

Shields’ next novel, A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982),¹ takes place over the same week, but from the perspective of Jack’s wife, Brenda, who has gone to Philadelphia for a craft convention. Brenda is a quilter and Brenda, so we’re told by her husband in Happenstance, has no sense of history at all, doesn’t go in much for big ideas, or see the world in those terms.

Except that A Fairly Conventional Woman reveals that Brenda actually does, very much, and that she’s assured enough of her vision that she doesn’t have to argue with Jack about it. However quietly, she knows that “…history was no more than a chain of stories, the stories that happened to everyone and that, in time, came to form the patterns of entire lives, her own included.”

A chain of stories, which is not so different from a quilt, and just as quotidian. And this is a notion that finds its way into Shields fifth book, Various Miracles (1985), a book that is also a quilt, a literary patchwork, in that it’s a collection of short fiction.