SOURCE: Scurr, Ruth. “Not Quotidian.” New Statesman 13, no. 594 (28 February 2000): 58-9.

In the following review of Dressing Up for the Carnival, Scurr comments on the thematic links within each story, maintaining that Shields is a powerful storyteller who uses an experimental narrative style and playful inventiveness in her stories.

“Absence,” a story in Carol Shields's new collection [Dressing Up for the Carnival], echoes Georges Perec's La Disparition in both name and conceit. Famously, Perec set out to write a novel without using the letter “e” and succeeded. Shields matches him, discreetly, with a story about a writer and a broken keyboard from which the letter “i” has disappeared: “She would be resourceful, look for other ways, and make an artefact out of absence. She would, to put the matter bluntly, make do.” Making do, cheerful canny compromise, reappears in “Invention.” Initially inspired by uxorial devotion, the unexpected commercial success...