SOURCE: "Men and Women, Forever Misaligned," in The New York Times Book Review, March 27, 1994, pp. 3, 14.

[Parini is an American poet, novelist, critic, and educator. In the following review, he favorably assesses The Stone Diaries.]

Carol Shields, the American-born Canadian novelist and story writer, is often mentioned in the same breath with Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, and her last novel, The Republic of Love, attracted a small but enthusiastic band of admirers, myself among them. Last year The Stone Diaries was nominated for Britain's Booker Prize and acclaimed by many reviewers there. Now it has been published here, and it deserves our fullest attention.

The novel provides, glancingly, a panorama of 20th-century life in North America. Written in diary format, it traces the life of one seemingly unremarkable woman: Daisy Goodwill Flett, who is born in 1905 and lives into the 1990's. The Stone Diaries includes an elaborate family...