The Box Garden

Why go to a psychoanalyst when you can simple spend a pleasant evening with "The Box Garden" to the same effect? This is a home-coming story: all the ghosts of the past are met by an apparently weak fearful character, who finds she can meet each challenge, accept others, make confident choices and appreciate herself. No, I have no desire for Charleen to get on Prozac quick! Or to smack her on the side of the head, as one reviewer here said. A shocking statement, indicating that a society can go backwards rather than forwards. The low-tech 70's is kind-of fun to revisit. Now we have even more opportunities to come full circle with our relationships and our past. But do we? Charleen is solidly in the ordinary, dull, broken, world most of us live in daily. Yet at the same time she keeps seeing, and making choices, that place her in the transcendent world that heals and honors life. And she makes the experience seem almost easy, like watching a movie. How did Shields make all these characters seem three-dimensional, real, not stereotypes? Lots of dialog? The narrator's sensitive awareness? Even her son Seth, who is always good, easy-going, seemed real to me: a lot of kids just adapt to the adults around them until they're adults. And what about the broken-down, broken-apart people in our lives? The Watsons and the Gretas? The people who have dumped us, or whom we try to dump? Shield handles these people, who no doubt are all around all of us, with grace and hope. I won't reveal too much about Brother Andrew. But I did feel the relationship with this character was not resolved. The novel could have expanded on Charleen's image of Brother Andrew versus reality. What was she looking for in Brother Andrew and how did she integrate that into herself? I wanted to hear more. A beautiful and fun story that also points the way to how to live a better life. The trip across Canada was just another plus.

Carol Shields's second novel, The Box Garden, quickly followed her first, Small Ceremonies, and features some of the same characters. But the books are not mirror images. They are both entertaining, insightful, humanistic--Shields cares deeply about her afflicted characters. Judith Gill, biographer, mother of two and happily married to Martin, narrated Small Ceremonies; younger sister and divorced poet Charlene Forrest tends The Box Garden. It is not surprising that two sisters can see the world so differently, but that Shields can make Judith and Charlene's disparate views of the same characters so authentic. Charlene is the quirkier. Within a few pages, she confesses a lack of courage. She is a published poet, at home with language, if not the world. Charlene is raising a son who is content with what the world and his mother offer. How did this happen, she muses? Charlene travels east from Vancouver to Toronto for her mother's wedding with her boyfriend, Eugene. The trip proves full of challenges and fulfillment, new friends and family reconnected, including Judith's clan. Charlene experiences a series of small epiphanies through these encounters. She allows herself escape from her small garden to a larger world, full of the unknown, but with hints of acceptance of life as it is. Shields's language is as rich as the assembled characters, which inlcude the mother of all negative mothers, defrocked priests and spiritual charlatans. Bring a pen and paper along for the read to jot down Shield's matchless discriptions of everyday life and families for future use.

Box Garden was a re-read for me, and I think I enjoyed it more the second time. Its protagonist, Charleen Forrest, is the sister of the suburban Mom and biographer/novelist who is the protagonist of two other Shields novels. Shields herself was a biographer/novelist and suburban mom. Shields is in top form in the Box Garden, piling on beautiful, original, totally apt metaphors, while capturing family scenes with economy and humor. Not only the biographer, but her husband and children show up in the Box Garden, and it would be a great first read for the lucky individual who is new to Carol Shields. In fact, I found the biographer's husband more alive in the Box Garden than in the other Shield's novels. Charleen is a woman with a teenage son who has yet to recover from her divorce of many years, a divorce which was not bitter, but entailed a great sense of loss and disillusionment. Charleen's mother, a totally repressed individual, is a great character, as well as the mother's new fiancee. The plot has something of a bizarre, but credible twist. My only complaint: Charleen's son is a little too well adjusted.

Most people suffering from Charleen Forrest's specific kind of neuroses would have rushed to the nearest shrink and demanded Prozac. But Charleen just had to suck it up, carry on, and make the best of her rather bizarre experiences with just trying to get through life, one day at a time.It's a testimony to the skill of Carol Shields that we don't want to smack this woman upside the head and tell her to get herself some help; instead, we end up siding with her, embracing her oddities, and wanting to read more, more, more books by this wonderful author.

Charleen Forrest (nee McNinn) is , in good Carol Shields fashion, mostly an observer in her own life. Still in love with her absent, long divorced ex-husband, she alternates bouts of scathing self criticism with ones of gentle dithering. Three days involving enormous amounts of travel, excitement and revelation somehow leave Charleen with just a minor adjustment in her modus operandi. Readers of Ms. Sheilds "Small Ceremonies" will be interested to find Charleen is sister to that novel's biographer heroine, Judith (who makes an appearance here with her husband, Martin, and children as well). Showing the reader what can and cannot be revealed through words as Charleen concentrates most of her energies on correspondence with a mysterious botanist, and showing as well her curious gift for rendering the intangible into a three dimensional state ("Yes." I agree, forcing my voice into short plumes of enthusiasm, "Really good. So tender.") Carol Shields gives this small book the weight of her full talents