Books: Turning Over The Last Page

But pain is never far: it's the book's frozen, icy core, and the most vivid moments in Unless demonstrate the oblique, unexpected angles at which agony can enter our lives--as when Reta impulsively scrawls MY HEART IS BROKEN in the ladies' room of a bar, or when she effortlessly encapsulates postholiday gloom with a single question: "Is there any task as joyless as undecorating a tree?" Unless isn't a grand finale to Shields' oeuvre; it's not a monumental summing up. It's a graceful coda, an arabesque performed over an abyss. Reta speaks to us in a voice both calm and urgent. This is no time for prevarication, she seems to say. This is the time for truth.

For Shields, time is growing short. Comfortably retired in an ivy-covered mansion in Victoria, British Columbia, she is wrapping up a few last obligations--a preface here, an essay there. She goes antiquing with her daughter, attends a local discussion group, answers e-mail. She tires easily, her face going gray with fatigue (her husband hovers protectively), and she still writes in a sunny upstairs study that used to be a sewing room. She is even considering an excursion into the sonnet. She will write as long as she can. As Reta puts it, "This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it."