SOURCE: "Voorstand, Go Home!," in The New York Times Book Review, February 12, 1995, p. 7.

An American-born Canadian novelist, poet, playwright, and critic, Shields won a Pulitzer Prize and a Governor General's Award for her novel The Stone Diaries (1993). In the review below, she remarks favorably on The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith.

Peter Carey has always been a novelist of size. Previous novels like The Tax Inspector and Oscar and Lucinda were big books constructed around large ideas. Now, with The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, he gives his readers a new big novel, his most ambitious to date. The word "unusual" in the title is a tossed pebble of understatement. Tristan Smith's life is brimful of extravagant sorrows and conflicting loyalties, of self-hatred and well-tended hubris. His voice, which dominates the narrative, is the intelligent, freakish voice of an actor miscast in the world and in his body...