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A review of The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of an ordinary woman, Daisy Goodwill Flett, born in Manitoba in 1905, from many points of view.

Reviewed by: Joan Prefontaine
About Joan Prefontaine

The Stone Diaries The events of Daisy Goodwill Flett's life are not particularly compelling. She is born in 1905 in Manitoba and dies in Sarasota, Florida in 1985. Her mother dies when she is born and she travels with her stonecutter father to Indiana. She marries, becomes a widow, remarries, has children, and grows old.

The highlight of Daisy's life is when she becomes a garden columnist for a newspaper, and has many fans who write to her, asking about remedies for blights on flowers and other such topics. When she loses her job to a man for no good reason, she never completely recovers from the shame of not having a public identity.

Why would we want to read about the rest of Daisy's existence, which is, for the most part, conventional and predictable, based on filling others' expectations and fighting despair? We read the rest of this fictionalized autobiography because Shields has a way of addressing her character's inner realities with lyrical affection and quiet irony. Because the story is told from many points of view over time, we are offered a complex, historical understanding of Daisy's life.

As the title suggests, stone is a significant and haunting image in the book, often conjuring up images of death or the inability to lend full expression or consciousness to life. After Daisy's mother (who was named Mercy Stone Goodwill) dies in childbirth, her father, Cuyler Goodwill, builds a monumental tower of stones beside her mother's grave. The sculpture becomes something of a tourist attraction. Obsessed with engraving stones both at work and after work, he forgets he is a father "for days at a time."

Later, when Daisy is approaching death, it is not surprising that she thinks of stone. Shields writes: "Stone is how she finally sees herself, her living cells replaced by the insentience of mineral deposition." She imagines herself as quiet, timeless, classical. "Only minimal energy is required to call up her stone self and hold it in place."

When Daisy dies (her final unspoken words are "I am not at peace"), Shields uses a wry mixture of hearsay, bits of conversation, recipes, check-lists, names of places Daisy has lived and books she has on her shelf, as well as funeral excerpts, ingeniously suggesting the ways in which we protect ourselves from the emotions of loss by tending to surrounding distractions.

This novel deftly explores the limits of autobiography, lucidly showing us that a life is never what it seems on the surface, even to the person experiencing it.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Stone Diaries

Copyright © by Joan Prefontaine, 2003

Reviewed by Joan Prefontaine:
-- The Secret Life of Dust - by Hannah Holmes
-- Lying Awake: - by Mark Salzman
-- The Art & Craft of Playwriting - by Jeffrey Hatcher
-- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - by Stephen King
-- Earth Prayers From Around the World - Edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
-- The Beauty of the Beast - Selected by Jack Prelutsky, Illustrated by Meilo So
-- The Intimate Merton - Edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo
-- Plainsong - by Kent Haruf
-- The Stone Diaries - by Carol Shields
-- City of God - by E. L. Doctorow









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