Friday, January 13, 2023

Pulitzer Project: The Stone Diaries

It's been awhile since I bothered reading any Pulitzer Prize fiction winners. Back in 2021 I hit a couple that were such duds that I lost interest in bothering with Interlibrary Loan to work my way up the list. But after we got to Hot Springs, a city large enough to have a public library that hasn't overdosed on Danielle Steele, I checked the online catalog and then asked the Younger Daughter to check the 1995 winner, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, out for me.

The book turned out to be surprisingly good. Not great, but definitely readable. Shields could write. The book is  structured as a faux biography (or possibly memoir) of/by Daisy Goodwill Flett, a woman born in a small town in Manitoba in 1905 who manages to make it into her 80s before a bad fall triggers a decline in her health. 

By the time The Stone Diaries was published, Shields was an established author with a good reputation in Canada. She was in the comfortable position of feeling free to play around with formatting, perspective, style. . . she even inserts a section of vintage photos to mimic the type of old family photos a reader would expect to see in a real biography or memoir. That particular literary trick didn't go over very well with me. I'm not sure if Shields meant for there to be a disconnect between the way a reader finds herself visualizing the characters and the supposed photos of them (a character described as "morbidly obese" appears to be not especially fat, for example) or if the incongruities were simply an accident, but the end result was that to me that section just felt weird. 

Some sections are told in the first person, some in the third, but all are more or less the story of Daisy's life. Some of the narrative is from Daisy's perspective, some is how things may have looked to the people around her. For example, at one point a college friend of Daisy's visits for a few days, and the author gives us two radically different interpretations of how that visit went. One version describes a happy home, well behaved children, and a Daisy who seems to have her life pretty much together. The other version has Daisy as a fraud, her kids rude, and depicts a household the visitor would be happy to never visit again. 

So who is Daisy Goodwill Flett? In most ways, a rather ordinary woman. She's smart, but not brilliant; attractive but not necessarily stunning; hardworking but not ambitious. She's like most of us: she goes through life behaving appropriately but not making many waves. Her life has had some tragic blips -- her mother dies in childbirth, when she's eleven years old her foster mother is killed in a bicycle accident, her first husband manages to kill himself by falling out of a second floor window on their honeymoon -- but other than hearing the splat when Husband Number One hits the pavement she's not a witness to the events. She was present when her mother died, but witnessing a death when she'd only been breathing for a few minutes herself probably didn't make much of an impression. She is, in fact, remarkably untouched by events happening around her. 

And maybe that's the point. Maybe Daisy represents all of us. We all go through life experiencing various blips but most of the time we all just muddle on. 

So was the book worth reading? More than most of the ones on the list, although still not one of the truly good ones. On the usual scale of 1 being the worst, 10 being the best, it's a solid 7. Decent writing, not a whole lot of work to get through, but in the end not that special. The Younger Daughter asked me what makes a book merit a Pulitzer. Sometimes it's because it's an amazing work of literature and sometimes it's the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Even though the announcement may say the award is for The Most Recent Work the reality is the prize is actually acknowledging the half a dozen or more better works the author cranked out decades earlier. Not being familiar with Shields' previous work I don't know if The Stone Diaries qualifies as a lifetime achievement award candidate, but it feels like it could. 

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Sure, why not. It's decently written, moderately interesting, and inoffensive. This book, in fact, proved to be such a relief to read compared to some of the others I suffered through as part of this Pulitzer Project that I've already moved on to the next one on the list, Richard Ford's Independence Day*, the 1996 winner. At this point, I'm within 25 books of the most recent winner and have already read three of the 25 out of order, it looks like I could actually live long enough to read them all. . . especially if there's a year or two between now and whenever I get to the end that no prize for fiction is awarded. 

*Also surprisingly readable. I'm already about a third done with it. 

1 comment:

  1. I read constantly. When I hit a author's character of story line I like I read his or her entire output in order. I have tried to read from list, but I find it more of an assignment than an enjoyment.
    the Ol'Buzzard

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