“The impulses of others are seldom understandable; they seem to spring out of irrational material, out of the dark soil of the subconscious. But I have respect for impulses and for the mystery they suggest.”

Living in Ontario, Canada, protagonist Judith Gill is a biographer who aspires to write fiction. She is the wife of academic Martin Gill, a professor of Milton studies, and the mother of two teens. The primary storyline revolves around her interactions with an author (and former teacher) Rudyard “Furlong” Eberhardt, who has written a best-seller but has used material of questionable provenance. Judith is aware of where the material originated and had, at one time, attempted to use it herself.

“I’m going to have it out with Furlong. He’s going to have to do some explaining. Or else. Or else what? Endlessly, silently, I debate the point. What power do I have over Furlong? Who am I, the far from perfect Judith Gill, to judge him, and how do I hope to chastise him for his dishonesty? I only want him to know that I know what he did. Why? What’s the point? Why not let it pass? Because what he’s done may be too small a crime to punish, but at the same time it’s too large to let go unacknowledged.”

Shields is adept at the exploring a person’s inner life. Major theme in this novel is that we can never truly know another person. This theme plays out in Judith’s relationship with her husband as well as her former teacher. The novel conveys underlying tensions between characters, particularly the differences between the private person and the public persona. It highlights the miscommunications between individuals that take place regularly.

As a character-driven novel, it is not flashy or filled with action. Instead, it is a deep character study of people who seem very real. Shields is a keen observer of human nature. I found myself constantly nodding and saying, “wow, that’s so true.” This book was published in 1976 and is the author’s debut. Recommended to those who enjoy quiet novels with deeply drawn characters and enough of a plot to maintain interest.
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[Small Ceremonies] would have been a one-sitting read for me, if there hadn't been other things I absolutely HAD to set it aside for. Judith Gill is a wife, mother and biographer currently working on a comprehensive life of [[Susanna Moodie]]. She hopes to research every last work and source until she finally "gets" the enigmatic woman. Meanwhile, Judith also reflects on the lives and behaviors of her husband, her children, and her friends. She gets a bit introspective about her own life, but not in an off-putting, navel-gazing sort of way. She analyzes off-hand comments, taking possibly more meaning from them than is intended, accepting some and rejecting others. The fundamental ordinariness of things, even certain big moments and lsating disappointments, ultimately brings some comfort and acceptance to Judith. This worked for me in the simple, understated way that Barbara Pym's novels do.
July 2017 ( )

Contains a SPOILER.

Having read The Stone Diaries, I went to the library to pick out some other books by Carol Shields. Chose Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden quite at random, mainly because they happened to be the least marked up and dogeared in the collection. That they are companion volumes came as a pleasant surprise: I was happy to find myself in a familiar universe. The protagonists of the two novels are sisters: while The Box Garden is told from the perspective of Charlene Forrest, a recently divorced poet residing with her son in British Columbia and earning her living as a proofreader for a nature journal, Small Ceremonies focuses on Judith Gill, a biography writer, married to a Milton specialist, and a mother of two teenagers. The couple spend a year in Birmingham, UK, subletting an apartment belonging to a British family who in turn are spending a year abroad on Cyprus. In that run-down, uncomfortable residence, where "The draught from the lavatory window can be wretched ... but we take comfort that the air is fresh", Judith comes upon a stack of unpublished manuscripts by John Spaulding, their British landlord. She secretly reads through the mediocre prose -- admitting to it would be perceived as a form of betrayal by her straight-laced husband, Martin -- and then forgets about it... until, back in the States, struggling with a writer's block, she decides to set aside her biographies and venture into fiction. She enrolls in a creative writing course with a local celebrity author named Furlong Eberhardt, only once again to face the familiar fear of the blank page. The way out of the impasse offers itself in the form of a plot pilfered from Spaulding's novel. As soon as the novel is complete and handed over to the instructor, Judith feels remorse and asks Furlong to burn it. Later on, when Furlong publishes his first novel in some years, having achieved a sort of breakthrough in his own writer's block, Judith is scandalized to recognize the plot line of her own aborted novel.

Small Ceremonies is written with great tenderness and humor, and, like The Box Garden it subtly comments on the writer's craft. As she struggles with her inability to invent fictional events, Judith jots down ideas, inspired mostly by her observation of people in the street: "Tweedy man on bus, no change, leaps off", "beautiful girl at concert, husband observes her legs, keeps dropping program," ... And so on. They're going nowhere. One such observation echoes The Stone Diaries, though: "story in paper about a woman who has baby and doesn't know she's preg. Husband comes home from work to find himself a father. Dramatize." (There's a summary for the age of Twitter!)

"My random jottings made no sense to me at all. When I wrote them down I must have felt something; I must have thought there was yeast there, but whatever it was that had struck me at the time had faded away. There was no centre, no point to begin from."

Those dead-end stories echo those few ever told by her parents: "From my mother I can recall only two frail anecdotes, and the terrible thin poverty of their details may well account for my girlhood hunger for an expanded existence." Where Judith feels most at home is, rather than fiction or her own life story, other people's lives. Of the life of Susanna Moodie, whom she is researching (and whose biography, by the way, Carol Shields did write), Judith says:

"It is a real life, a matter of record, sewn together like a leather glove with all the years joining, no worse than some and better than many. A private life, completed, deserving decent burial, deserving the sweet black eclipse, but I am setting out to exhume her, searching, prying into the small seams, counting stitches, adding, subtracting, keeping score, invading an area of existence where I've no real rights. I ask the squares of light that fall on the oak table, doesn't this woman deserve the seal of oblivion? It is, after all, what I would want. ... But I keep poking away. ... The task of the biographer is to enlarge on available data. The total image would never exist were it not for the careful daily accumulation of details."

All writers are thieves then: the biographer is a sort of scavenger, poring over the dead writer's novels in search of juicy details and fleshy morsels. The novelist is an inveterate pilferer of plot lines and life details which he rearranges in his or her own fashion. While the motif of the stolen plot might have ended in tragedy, Carol Shields prefers a more true-to-life, subdued ending, which speaks however with the force of gentle irony. John Spaulding visits the Gills during a trip to Canada to see a publisher: finally, one of his novels is going to see the light of day. And, he says, he owes this breakthrough to none other than the Gill family: they are an inspiration for his book -- they and the letters which Judith's son, Richard, exchanged with Spaulding's daughter, Anita.

The novel ends with a sort of anticlimax. When asked whether he happened to know Furlong's latest novel, Spaulding replies that he's read: "Stuffy prose. But a ripping good yarn I though." "Astonishing," Judith comments. "He hadn't recognized his own plot which passed first through my hands and then into Furlong's." ( )

Explores the ethical and creative challenges faced by biographers and fiction writers, and how these two fields are not quite as separate as they ought to be, perhaps. The biographer, faced with a gap in the historical record, has to decide whether to make up the missing pieces, based on an educated guess--stepping a bit into the realm of fiction. Fiction writers pillage diaries, overheard conversations, discarded novels-in-progress, letters between lovers, raising the question: does fiction have to be all "made up"? The line between narrative nonfiction and historical fiction grows ever thinner, bringing to mind Pilate's question: "What is truth?" An enjoyable, quick read, though I found the first-person narrator not all that likable. ( )

Biographer Judith Gill prides herself on detecting the secrets of her dead subjects, but fails to understand the motives and behaviour of her family and friends. ( )