BOOK REVIEW : Showcase for a Wide-Ranging Talent

The narrator of the title story--”The Orange Fish”--in this collection of short stories by Carol Shields candidly admits that for the past 12 years, he’s been unhappily married to a lawyer who would have preferred to live in Vancouver and raise dahlias, while he still toys with his dream of owning a dude ranch. This morning, he’s staring at a small blank patch above the breakfast table, trying to transfer the pain of his ulcer to that spot on the wall, doing his best to forget that his 40th birthday is imminent.

“What we need,” he says, gesturing at the void, “is a picture.”

Within hours, they’re the owners of a bright lithograph in green and orange; a merry fish at ease in his element. The quality of life improves almost at once. The ulcer subsides, the marriage revives, and when an invitation arrives summoning the 10 owners of the fish lithograph to a meeting, they go.

The evening is rather like AA, with various people rising to testify about how the picture has changed their luck, or their outlook, which amounts to the same thing.

Even as they speak, thousands of orange fish posters are rolling off the presses, to be followed by buttons, earrings, sweat shirts and neckties. The story mercifully ends there, before anyone says “Keep swimming” after bagging the groceries or filling the gas tank.

Although a palpable ruefulness suffuses several of the stories, others are broadly comic.

In “Chemistry,” the protagonist recalls a winter in the early 1970s when he was in an advanced recorder class at a Montreal YMCA and intensely aware of the woman next to him: “the hollows of your bent elbows and the seam of your upper lip . . . the bony intimacy of your instep circling in air.”

For a season, this small, ill-assorted group plays as one, “music so cool and muffled it seems smoothed into place by a thumb.” Then suddenly it’s spring; the class is over and the members disperse, leaving the narrator with the lingering fantasy that one day he’ll find an envelope in his mailbox from the owner of those elbows and that instep.

“Hazel” is the story of a widow who refuses to accept the fate of other women in her position. She takes a job demonstrating kitchen appliances, embarrassing her daughters and astonishing herself. Wryly funny, this story puts convention in its place.

The irony is more overt in “Block Out,” in which a prolific author of junk novels is stalled by an acute attack of writer’s block--a boon to Canadian letters, but a tragedy for Meershank’s second wife, who doubles as his agent.

Although she brings him ethnic delicacies, imported pears and stimulating gossip from Toronto’s literary marketplace, she is unable to effect a cure. Despite her strenuous efforts, “in the end, it’s a matter of waiting things out in an improvised shelter and thinking as kindly of yourself as possible.”

In “Collision,” we leave Canada for a larger universe, one in which Shields presents the provocative theory that our atmosphere not only consists of biographical data, but is rapidly becoming polluted by information about everyone who has ever lived.

“Where else in this closed lonely system can our creaturely dust go but up there on top of the storied slag heap?” Kept plausible by a central character both realistic and endearing, “Collision” is a showcase for the author in a more ambitious mode.

Even the less fanciful stories manage to put a fresh spin on what might otherwise be mundane domestic situations: a holiday dinner, a long drive over the empty prairie, a daughter’s curiosity about a blank year in her mother’s life.

Shields is at her best when her characters either finally manage to explain themselves to each other or fail in a valiant attempt.

In one such conversation, a husband tells his wife that “the saddest thing that had ever happened . . . was seeing the movie ‘Easy Rider,’ and then coming home and climbing into a pair of striped pajamas and going to bed”--a revelation that’s par for the course.

THE ORANGE FISH by Carol Shields Viking $17.95, 199 pages

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Fall Quarter” by Weldon Kees (Story Line Press).