The Stone Diaries

I'd never heard a word about this book despite it winning the Pulitzer in the mid-90s.

It was on James Mustich's list, and I hadn't read one of those titles in a moment, so I gave it a go.

The first chapter is so off-putting in its description of Mercy Goodwill I nearly gave up. But I didn't, and I'm glad I stuck with it because this is a wonderful piece of fiction. It's episodic in that it describes the course of one woman's life but includes her fore-bearers and descendants. At its core, this is an engaging book about a woman who lead a dull life. If you enjoy gardening (I do, with mixed results), you will like all the wonderful descriptions of flowers in this book. Gardening is a big theme, as is stonework.

There's a recollection by the main character at the end of her life that is more stream of consciousness than anything else and listed is every house she ever lived in. That passage reminded me so much of my grandmother. I digitized all of our family photos years ago and stacked in a box I found a sheath of photos, all of houses. Not children or family in front of houses, merely the houses themselves. On the back, the address was rarely written but the photos were numbered. Every house she'd ever lived in. My mom told me once that they'd moved 18 times over the course of her childhood because my grandfather liked to save money by buying and selling property and carrying the title for the new owner. What did my grandmother think about moving that often? Did her opinion carry much weight? Just another photograph in a box.

I liked the Stone Diaries a lot, although I'm wondering is it because it's one of the only books I've read that creates a juxtaposition between reality and fiction. As the omniscient narrator, Daisy clarifies that her accounts of events are sometimes exaggerated and often unreliable throughout the novel. Usually, an autobiography is accurate in telling the truth about one's own life. However, throughout the book, presumably Daisy's autobiography, we see letters and monologues from other characters, varying and contradicting points of view, and each character's inner thoughts, which someone writing a typical autobiography could not know. I did admire how Shields portrayed this.

On the other hand, I felt a slight removal from the story, possibly because there was a bit of warmth missing in Daisy's life; every critical incident seemed to be one tragedy after another, or it ended in tears. The prose was beautifully written, but when the story is grim to the point of parody, then I became disinterested.

Lovely ending, though.