SOURCE: Ciabattari, Jane. “The Goodbye Girl.” Los Angeles Times (12 May 2002): 4.

In the following review, Ciabattari judges Unless as a consummately poignant and artistic novel.

Unless, Carol Shields' 10th novel, is a thing of beauty—lucidly written, artfully ordered, riddled with riddles and undergirded with dark layers of philosophical meditations upon the relative value of art, the realistic possibilities for women “who want only to be fully human” and the nature of goodness, that enduring human dilemma also worked thoroughly by Saul Bellow. What is goodness? How can goodness survive in the face of evil? How should a good woman—or man—live?

Shields, who was brought up in Oak Park, Ill.—Hemingway's birthplace—has spent her adult life in Canada, where she raised five children and taught literature before beginning her literary career with the novel Small Ceremonies, published when she was 40.

This makes her that rare creature...