SOURCE: Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. “The Allures of Form.” New Leader 83, no. 2 (May/June 2000): 35-7.

In the following review, Schwartz compares the stories in Dressing Up for the Carnival to Shields's novels, observing that the stories are more rooted in ideas than in character.

A spotlight on one book, however well-deserved, can cast the rest of a writer's work into shadow. Carol Shields, who has lived in Winnipeg for many years, is known to American readers for her 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diaries. But she is the author of eight earlier novels, and is a poet and playwright as well. To read her is to encounter a restive, experimental writer, one for whom the allures of form are paramount. The final section of Swann (1987), about four critics' discovery of a great unknown poet, purports to be the script of a film made at a literary symposium (the very...