Dressing Up for the Carnival, by Carol Shields

Carol Shields writes about ordinary people in ordinary situations. There's no stopping her. Characters grow on trees

Carol Shields writes about ordinary people in ordinary situations. There's no stopping her. Characters grow on trees. And she is direct and to the point with a splendid narrative flair. But sometimes one asks what is the point? The title story in this collection has folk doing different things such as buying a pram, or daffodils, or a mango, or dressing up in a great skirt without first consulting the weather. It's not Carol Shields's finest hour and she is a bit of a tease. Just as you are becoming seriously interested in, say, the price of daffs, she has shifted gear. Similarily, `Ilk', is steeped in academic-speak. It's a story about a woman, thought to be a man, as she uses her initials when writing serious expositions about the likes of "atemporal paradigms". And yet Carol Shields often captures the essence of a being. In, `Dying for Love', she features three women on the verge of suicide who decide to step back from the brink. "A woman at the end of love is not, after all, the same as a woman at the end of her tether." In, `Weather', a crisis arises when forecasters go on strike just to prove how dull life is without them. This is a strongly comic piece which manages some seriously tragic undertones. Carol Shields isn't tempted to be over-wordy. `Death of an Artist' is perhaps her best story, as she rolls back the years of an elderly man's life after he is found dead. "No one knew him, really knew him." And then he was dead. Brutal honesty takes some beating.