SOURCE: "Telling It Slant," in Books in Canada, Vol. 18, No. 4, May, 1988, pp. 9-14.

In the following essay, Wachtel provides an overview of Shields's life and career.

Four years ago, when Carol Shields turned 50, her writing turned a corner. The titles tell all. Before: Small Ceremonies, The Box Garden, Happenstance, and A Fairly Conventional Woman. After: Various Miracles, Swann: A Mystery, and now, The Orange Fish. "You get older and braver," she says, "braver about what you can say and what can be understood."

Her first four novels presented reliable pictures of middle-class, domestic life. Shields is expert at evoking the feelings and concerns of ordinary people—their ambivalence about their families, their jobs, and their mates. Her characters think. They try to be nice. And they often get stuck in boring situations—with spouses, parents, or colleagues. It's not the mad trapped housewife that Shields finds in suburbia...