This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.
The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.
Like several of her other stories, in "The Orange Fish" in just a few pages Shields takes us into the dynamics of years of a less than perfect marriage. It also has a very strange intriguing ending.
"LIKE OTHERS OF MY GENERATION I am devoted to food, money and sex, but I have an ulcer and have been unhappily married to Lois-Ann, a lawyer, for twelve years. As you might guess, we are both fearful of aging. Recently Lois-Ann showed me an article she had clipped from the newspaper, a profile of a well-known television actress who was described as being “deep in her thirties.” “That’s what we are,” Lois-Ann said sadly, “deep in our thirties.” She looked at me from behind a lens of tears. Despite our incompatibility, the two of us understand each other, and I knew more or less what it was she was thinking: that some years ago, when she was twenty-five, she made up her mind to go to Vancouver Island and raise dahlias, but on the very day she bought her air ticket, she got a letter in the mail saying she’d been accepted at law school. “None of us writes our own script,” she said to me once, and of course she’s right. I still toy—I confess this to you freely—with my old fantasy of running a dude ranch, with the thought of well-rubbed saddles and harnesses and the whole sweet leathery tip of possibility, even though I know the dude market’s been depressed for a decade"
The Carol Shields Trust in a good source of information
Even though it's the title story, and even though if I'd read it when it was brand new I probably would have loved it, this isn't my favourite. And the only line I flagged was the line with the title's reference in it. But I do think the way she flows between different elements of the smaller stories within this story is curious. And I chuckled at the passage you excerpted. When she's looking back at previous decades in her life, you can almost see the gentle smile on her face, directed at her younger self/selves. :-)
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by how the orange fish changes value
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