THE STONE DIARIES by Carol Shields

Finished Mo 5/14/18; after my court appearance for the expired license registration

This is one of my favorite novels of all time, and in this edition there is no note as to the last time I'd read it. It's probably been fifteen or twenty years, but I've never forgot it.

The reviews of the novel seem to regard Daisy's life as a kind of failure. I don't see it that way. I think it's an attempt to celebrate the normal and the mundane. Only a very small percentage of people who have lived are in any way notable.

 Her first husband was an alcoholic and on their honeymoon to Italy he falls out the window and dies after Daisy sneezes.

She meets a stonemason, Cuyler Goodwill they marry. He loves her absolutely- drowning in her over-weight body.

Mercy dies in childbirth while delivering Daisy. I'm not even sure that Mercy was aware that she was pregnant. It's possible that she didn't have a clear idea of how reproduction worked.

A neighbor, Mrs. Clarentine Flett leaves her husband. It was an unhappy marriage and the final straw is when the husband refuses to give her a couple of dollars to pay a dentist for an abscessed tooth.

Cuyler knows that he couldn't raise his daughter, and he later moves to Indiana and becomes a wealthy man. He doesn't reemerge into her life until much later.

Much later, when Clarentine dies her son, Barker Flett becomes Daisy's new husband. They have three children; Alice, Warren, and Joan.

Much of their lives are lived in the upscale Vinegar Hill neighborhood of  Bloomington, Indiana.



In the end of her life, Daisy relocates to Florida. This part of the novel reminded me of the Rabbit series.

The last lines of the book are my favorite:

"Someone should have thought of daisies."
"Yes."
"Ah, well."

A link to an excellent review of the book:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/07/reviews/shields-stonediaries.html

"The Stone Diaries, Shields' best-known novel, won the 1993 Governor General's Award for English language fiction in Canada and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the United States.

It is currently the only novel to have won both awards. Being an American-born naturalized Canadian, Shields was eligible for both awards. It also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize."