This combined novel has two front covers, as it were, and one half of the book is upside down in comparison with the other; it was originally published as two separate books: The Husband’s Story (1980) and The Wife’s Story (1982). Ostensibly the story of married couple Brenda and Jack’s first time apart in a long time, it’s also about the marriage as a whole and how each sees it and the other.
It could be described as a midlife-crisis novel. Brenda is attending a crafts convention in Philadelphia; it’s the first time in their 20-year marriage that she’s been away from home for a sustained period. She feels she is in a transition period in her life and considers having an affair with a man she meets and gets on well with at the convention. Her children are no longer dependent on her and she feels “a restless anger and a sense of undelivered messages”.
Jack, at home in Chicago, copes with two unruly adolescents, helps an old friend whose wife has left him, visits another friend who attempted suicide, feels his lost faith has left a growing void in his life and questions his worth as a historian. He’s a procrastinator who has a manuscript waiting to get published that has lain unfinished for years. With Brenda, there’s an unfinished quilt but she doesn’t hang about and we know she can finish it – perhaps she’s leaving it unfinished so Jack won’t feel badly about his book.
Nothing dramatic happens; it’s the ordinary, everyday happenings in a marriage that are Shields’s concern. Someone’s (I can’t remember whose) description of her as “the Midas of the mundane” has stuck in my mind, partly because of the alliteration but more so because of the perceptiveness. The describer painted the Midas touch in a positive light, ignoring its unfortunate consequences for the Greek mythological figure in question.
But there was no such ambiguity about the following critic’s observation along similar lines: “Carol Shields represents the difficult blessings of ordinary life as authentically as any novelist you’re likely to read – and more cheeringly than you might imagine possible.”
