The Republic of Love

The Republic of Love, Carol Shields' novel of love and isolation in the contemporary world, is entrancing, both in the depth of her characters and the elegance of her prose.  Shields was masterful in her telling of family drama and generous in her depiction of her characters.  She has offered us these gifts in this book that is joyful but never simplistic.

The two protagonists, Fay McLeod and Tom Avery, live their parallel lives as singles in their mid-30's (Fay) or even 40 (Tom) in Winnipeg.  Both have their serious, failed relationships for various reasons, and both are working desperately to be happy alone.  Though they do not meet until two-thirds of the way through the book, when they learn that they live across the street from each other, it is clear all along that they are on intersecting paths.  When they do finally meet, dear reader, fireworks, smoke, explosions, and peace on earth result.  Such a love story!

But you know the course of true love, and Carol Shields does, too.  She details the kind of complication that is both inevitable and vivifying, and she introduces a means of resolution that never breaches reality, though its event verges on the miraculous.  Given the size of the relationships detailed in this book, the event is suitably proportioned.

In addition to the satisfactions of the plot, Shields gives us an informed sense of Winnipeg as our setting. The bitterness of the winters and the attempts to carry on a normal life within the extended season relate to our characters and their attempts to identify some sort of warmth in their own loneliness.  The interconnections of characters, the way everyone sort of knows everyone else, or at least knows someone who does know them, is befitting a city of that size.  So it goes with love; through our experience with authentic love a world is made a community.

Another layer of reality Shields provides includes the jobs of our two protagonists.  Fay is a folklorist specializing in mermaids.  Shields is savvy enough as a writer to recognize that the metaphor may be a bit heavy-handed and addresses that within the story.  The character acknowledges her identification with the icon and her confusion in coming to terms with mermaids and their meaning in culture.  Tom Avery is a radio DJ with the overnight shift, midnight to four a.m.  His low-key approach to music and on-air conversation, his quirky taste in music, make him easy to like but hard to get to know.  Fay and Tom cross all those distances in the strength of their love.

Shields' prose reflects her underpinnings as a poet, and she knows love with an intimate eloquence.  Here is the first paragraph of a gorgeous passage about what they say about love:

"They say love makes angels of the wicked.  That people in love are kinder in their ways, stronger in their resolve and lit from within by an incandescence so generous, impulsive, and willing, so mild, too, and almost innocent, that other people, observing them, are reminded of young children--the good, stalwart, focused children of fairy tales" (230).

By the end of the book, we realize that we should not wait for something to drop out of the sky to live and love in every moment, to fold ourselves into the days and nights and seasons of the ones we love, and to rejoice in the everyday-ness of living with all fullness in the republic of love.

I have read three Carol Shields books in recent years.  She published The Republic of Love in 1992.  Stone Diaries came out the next year, winning the Pulitzer Prize.  Shields' last book was Unless, an intriguing and subtle family drama from 2002.   In 2003, Carol Shields died of breast cancer at the age of 68.

Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin

"Unfinished," indeed.  I enjoyed reading Unfinished Desires by Godwin, but at the end I was disappointed that the characters did not offer any evidence of growth.  Even though everybody is fifty years older at the end of the story, nobody seems to have changed except in hair style and mobility. 

Godwin created a suspenseful story with sufficiently complex narrative style to keep the reader moving between 2001 and 1951-52, when the primary eventsof the plot occur.  The book is set at a prestigious Catholic girls' school, run by cranky but powerful Mother Suzanne Ravenel.  The antagonists, including students and former classmates, come from two of the town's wealthiest families.  Dead or dysfunctional mothers abound in this book, and they never really achieve any sort of redemption, nor do the snotty girls who attend the school and grow up to be snotty women.

Meanwhile, the stereotype of nuns as frustrated  lesbians gets full treatment in Godwin's depiction of life among the sisters.  The founders of the order were two "old maids" (meaning, unmarried women in their twenties,) from England who came to the United States to establish a girls' school for wealthy families in the first part of the twentieth century.  Here the reader confronts one of the many perplexing motives within this book.  If these two characters were so driven to serve God selflessly that they converted to Catholicism and sought opportunities to serve, wouldn't a poorer community have been a better choice?  Instead, the two founders seem to be motivated by their desire to live out their lives as a couple in mutual satsfaction, without anyone questioning their intimacy.  Godwin hints at his, though she never deals with the issue outright.  The unfinished desires of the title refer to Suzanne Ravenel's attempts to do the same with the love of her life, who rejects her despite their promises to take vows together. If even the title of the book refers to women who love each other and cannot fulfill the relationship, a more honest and authentic treatment of the topic seems necessary for this book to fulfill its promise to the reader.

While Godwin writes smoothly and affectionately about her chracters, she does not allow them the complexity of inner change, and, consequently, I felt empty by the book's end.   Godwin herself is a graduate of St. Genevieve's School, which seems to have served as a model for the setting of this work of fiction.  She states in her acknowledgements that the true-life setting of her school "reman[s] vivid in my memory and dreams."  Perhaps it was necessary for her to flatten out her characters to avoid offending any past mentors or classmates, and I feel disappointed that we did not get a more realistic treatment of real people in a setting that carries so much meaning for its writer. 

Godwin's prose is effortlessly graceful and her treatment of spiritual topics is natural and informed.  In that sense I always enjoy her work, and my anticipation of her next book is not diminished by my sense of disappointment in the way this one ends.