Elegance and excess

Collected Stories
By Carol Shields
HarperCollins, 593 pp., $29.95

Picture this: It's the scene in "The Player" where screenwriters pitch stories to Tim Robbins, repeatedly couching their inventions as the mixed-blood progeny of two recent or current blockbusters. Robbins gives each writer two minutes, sometimes less, and he keeps shaking his head and frowning. And then Carol Shields walks in. She's a dynamo, and in 10 minutes she's sold him 56 screenplays. And about a third of them deserve double-wide distribution and will keep the folks in advertising happy, too, because these stories will find their audiences by word-of-mouth alone.

Consider "Segue," Shields's last completed work. Previously unpublished, it's the story of 67-year-old Jane Sexton, a writer of sonnets afflicted by an unnameable subtext. Recalling the late author's long battle with cancer, we hear the pitch -- and yes, in a way, it is "The Death of Ivan Ilych," updated and set in post-9/11 Chicago -- but that formulation offers only the merest suggestion of the story's restraint and beauty. Writing about writers and writing simply doesn't get better than this, and partly that's because Jane Sexton understands that the true sonnet subject is death -- her death -- and while she'd rather discuss the daily rituals of life with her husband, she knows that the sonnet, "that rectangle, perfect in its proportions," is a metaphor for life. "Think of the shape of a human life," Shields writes, "which, like it or not, is limited." Later, falling asleep, Jane thinks, at "the center of my cortex . . . a question awaits. What am I now? What is my position in the universe, in the fen and bog of my arrangements?" Her answer, when it comes at the story's conclusion, is a universal statement of Cartesian simplicity and theological precision, and we bow our heads, penitent.

After "Segue," "Collected Stories" reproduces Shields's three previous story collections in the order of their publication, "Various Miracles" (1985), "The Orange Fish" (1989), and "Dressing Up for the Carnival" (2000). To read them together is to recognize that although Shields mastered dozens of local dialects, the languages central to her short fiction are three: domestic realism, something we could call serial-character fiction, and another something we could call the epistemological parable.

First, domestic realism. One of the best examples is "Salt," which opens thus: "Halfway through his Canadian lecture tour, Thornbury found himself at an all-male dinner where the conversation had begun to flag." The wry, disciplined humor that packs that first clause recalls Evelyn Waugh -- the longer you study it, the funnier it gets. And then there's that buried needle of a proper noun and the diminishment of "all-male," followed by the limp infinitive that concludes the sentence. Better still, the rest of the story fulfills this early promise. In "Hinterland," another fine story in this mode, Shields gives us "Meg and Roy Sloan of Milwaukee, Wisconsin," vacationing in Paris. When the museum Roy visits is evacuated because of a bomb threat, he walks back to their hotel in an effort to calm himself. But "every face Roy sees is clothed with the dumb shine of ignorance. . . . He is emptied out, light-headed, agonizingly alert. He feels he's been as close to the edge of his life as he's ever likely to be." Call it an epiphany if you like, but the story doesn't end there; the poetry and pathos are in the pages that follow.

Then there's the serial-character story, in which three or more disparate characters enter, stage right, reveal an elbow or collarbone, and exit, stage left. Most of these fictions are without plot or consequence; their tone that of the obituary page; their characters, transitional devices. On the whole, a tedious exercise, and yet, at its best, the result is a story like "Dying for Love," where we eventually understand that the three disparate characters, each a would-be suicide, exist in the mind of a writer who feels morally responsible for them all.

Finally, there are Shields's epistemological parables, and here's where Robbins's enfant terrible gets his comeuppance, for these ficciones are built around one or another cultural or literary theory. And rest assured, when the studio execs get the final prints of some of these little demons, they'll be released direct to video: "Words," for instance (" 'Some Like It Hot' crossed with Saussurean semiotics"). Or "Weather" ("Media Studies meets cute, unattached signifier"). Or "Ilk" ("John Barth, duke of double entendre, lewdly engages the Modern Language Association's national conference program"), viz.: "By now everyone's seen the spring issue of Ficto-Factions, page 146, in which G.T.A., whoever he/she may be, summarizes the various papers that were presented at the recent NWUS Conference on Narrativity and Notation." E-i-e-i-o and Old MacDonald -- it's enough to cause poststructuralist stress disorder.

But. Even here, successes amid the excesses. For while some of Shields's parables are flattened under the weight of their theoretical parentage, others stand straight and tall and smile for the class photo. In "The Orange Fish," where fiction plays leapfrog with Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Shields offers an impish meditation on the restorative functions of art, taking up such secondary subjects as the subjectivity of interpretation and the contingency of community. It sounds ponderous, but it's a joyride, one delightful turn after another.

Nonetheless, I can't help thinking that a volume of Carol Shields's "New and Selected" would have made a better book, though given the awards bestowed on "The Stone Diaries" and "Larry's Party," a "Collected Stories" was probably inevitable. As the narrator of "Family Secrets" ruminates, "Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk." (Or, one is tempted to add, between the covers of a book.)

David Thoreen is chairman of the English Department at Assumption College in Worcester. His poetry has recently appeared in Slate and is forthcoming from Natural Bridge and The Alembic.