Top 100 Canadian Books: Unless by Carol Shields

Top 100 Canadian Books of All Time

In case you haven’t seen my Top 100 Canadian Books of All Time list, here’s a brief explanation. A few months ago, I looked at all the Top Canadian Books lists and prestigious Canadian literary awards I could find, took note of how many times (and how high up the list) each book appeared, and ranked the top 100. Now I’m slowly going through them all to see what they have to say about my beloved home country and whether I agree that they belong where they are on the list. This month’s Canadian read was Unless by Carol Shields, which sits at #46.

Unless

Wow. If there are 45 Canadians books we can justifiably say are better than this one, then the Canadian canon is rich indeed. Perhaps Canadians simply overlook this one in favour of Shields’ more popular, Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries, which ranks much higher on the list. Or maybe, being 23 years old and set months before 9/11, this book has slipped through the unfortunate cracks between tried-and-true-classics and recency-bias. Either way, I’m sad that I’d never heard of it before. This is a fantastic novel.

Basically, it follows Reta Winters, an author who narrates in first person as she juggles writing her latest novel and dealing with a family crisis. Her 19-year-old daughter, Norah, has recently dropped out of university and has taken up panhandling on a Toronto street corner, holding a cardboard sign that reads “GOODNESS.” Reta is understandably having a difficult time processing this, and her thoughts (and unsent, ranty letters to various writers or academics) constantly return to her desperate search for answers.

It’s Reta’s rambling and increasingly all-consuming thoughts that make Unless such a compelling read. Norah refuses to tell her family what caused her dramatic personality change, and everyone Reta talks to has a different theory. Reta’s own theory is that Norah feels, as a woman, shut out of the man’s world she’s living in, but the reader can see that those are Reta’s feelings, not Norah’s. She’s merely projecting them onto her daughter to fill in the blanks that are driving her to despair. It’s absolutely stellar storytelling.

What does Unless say about Canada?

Unless is unmistakably a Canadian novel. The setting is mainly Orangetown, a fictional town just outside of Toronto. But Norah’s panhandling spot is repeatedly referred to as “the corner of Bloor and Bathurst,” a real Toronto streetcorner that many Canadians can picture just by seeing those words. Queen’s Square is mentioned, and Honest Ed’s (a now-closed Toronto store but still a famous Canadian landmark) holds a key position in the plot. This book was written by a Canadian for Canadians, and it makes no apologies about that.

I’ve actually never read a more quintessentially Canadian paragraph than this, from page 235: “And Chrétien is back in power with a huge majority, though the American election results continue to be stalled. Margaret Atwood did win the Booker Prize. We are going to have a white Christmas, it is guaranteed.” That familiar mix of Canadian and American politics, Margaret Atwood being our great hope for worldwide literary attention, and snow. All that’s missing is maple syrup!

Honestly, I wish I’d studied this book in university. I could analyze its binaries for hours, especially when it comes to subconscious defaults: male over female, American over Canadian, marriage over civil partnership, anglophone over francophone, etc. There are so many layers to this novel, but every one of them speaks to the early-21st-century Canadian experience.

Should it be #46 on the list?

No. I really wish this had ended up in the top 20. Ranking this low, it makes my list look like a lie! So much for my points system. 🤣

You can buy Unless here on Bookshop.org*.
*As an affiliate, I’ll receive a small commission from any purchase made through this link.