The writer has a strong presence in this shrewd collection of stories. By this is meant not only writer as author, but writers in general, the lonely, odd, strange people who sit down to invent their worlds. Many of the 22 pieces gathered here are hasty but others are more deliberate, self-conscious exercises in the business of writing. Yet a select few possess a life and vibrancy that hint at the best of Carol Shields, more novelist than short story writer, whose art has always been shaped by intelligence and a practical, candid view of the tricks we adopt in order to live.
Never quite guilty of taking her reader by the throat with the quietly ruthless genius of an Alice Munro - who really is a master of making stories unfold through layers - the US-born, but long-time Canadian-based Shields tends to contain herself within an image rather than risk the twists which force a narrative on to a higher level. She's also a teller of truths and this is a book of truths, particularly good on age and dead love, but it's as if she has always aimed to be responsible, rather than unforgettable.
Throughout Dressing Up for the Carnival with its often heady brightness, undercut by controlled rage, she makes statements, sets up images rather than pursues narratives. The opening, and title, story is unconvincingly random - enough to make one feel like abandoning the entire volume. It is, however, saved by one character in a town of people celebrating their day. "We cannot live without our illusions," decides this man, "an anonymous, middle-aged citizen who, sometimes, in the privacy of his own bedroom, in the embrace of happiness, waltzes about in his wife's lace-trimmed nightgown." Elsewhere Sandy, a talkative divorcee with a daughter and a succession of brief relationships chalked up, meets Todd, her hyperverbal equal. "Both of them loved to talk - or, more accurately, they felt compelled to talk." All goes well enough until she makes the mistake of deciding that Matthew Hooke, about whom Todd has written, was weird because he lived with his mother. Here a simple story with a words, words, words theme acquires a dramatic weight as Shields shifts the narrative tone, enabling the reader to taste Sandy's growing confusion. "Sandy felt the conversation running out of control. She didn't know what it meant or who was defending whom, but she'd been here before often enough to understand how the most intricate arrangements can be dismantled by a single uttered phrase."
In "A Scarf" the narrator is a writer who has suddenly come good enough to merit a three-city book tour. While enduring what develops into a lonely, unglamorous odyssey she decides to buy a present for one of her daughters. The decision results in a search which eventually leads her through 20 shops. But in that last one she finds a scarf which becomes a symbol of love and beauty. That done, she meets up with an old friend who hears the story and mistakenly assumes the dazzling object is for her.
One of the more cryptic, writerly stories features an abandoned lover who on being subjected to sitting with her former partner and his new love, preserves her dignity by holding her head "bravely erect as though she were sniffing a long-stemmed rose, a trick she had learned from an article in a beauty magazine".
In an uncharacteristically surreal tale, "The Harp", the narrator is hit by a harp which falls from a window during a Christmas party. Upset as she lies in hospital, repeatedly told she was lucky only to have been hit by the harp not the broken glass, she understandably reports, "I cried for two days" and asks, "was there any justice in the world?" In one of two brilliantly-timed twists, the narrator recalls her estranged father mishearing the facts. " `That doesn't sound too serious to me,' he said in his fatherly way. `A heart is a relatively soft and buoyant organ . . . `You'll get over it in no time'." Best of all, though, is the moment the harpist visits her in hospital, not to sympathise, but to suggest as the harp is damaged, "that I contribute to her costs."
Overall the collection is a mixed bag, at times sketchy, at times overworked, even laboured - such as the story of a couple whose life is dominated by a yearly pilgrimage to a nudist camp. Some have little point, such as "Absence", in which a writer determined to create a story that possessed "a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple, and a small blue cradle," appears foiled by a faulty keyboard. "Death of An Artist", traces an old man's relentlessly self-inventing, "choleric, odd, furiously unproductive, and thoroughly unsatisfying life" backwards through eight "plump" volumes of "undiaries".
Still, there is a gem. In "Edith-Esther" the eponymous heroine, now 80, is a writer more concerned with the daily struggle of survival than battling with her bullying biographer. It is hilarious and touching, as Edith-Esther is an author whose work is "bleak . . . or when she wants to treat herself more kindly, austere." Refusing to offer her readers "the least crumb of comfort", it leads the reader of this volume to wonder whether this phrase expresses the central dilemma Shields faces herself; whether to comfort or confront her audience. Too often she opts for compromise.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and an Irish Times journalist
