A Fairly Conventional Woman

Linda MacKinley-Hay was a teacher and freelance book reviewer in Fredericton, N.B.

Happenstance, or historical accident, underlies this novel. Happenstance is also the title of Carol Shields’ third novel (McGraw-Hill, 1980), to which this work is a companion piece. The earlier novel concerns Jack Bowman of Elm Park, Illinois, historian and successful family man who, in “one pivotal” week while his wife is away, must come to terms with his personal and professional doubts. In A Fairly Conventional Woman, Shields concentrates on Brenda Bowman, quilter and realist, who meets crises of her own while attending an out-of-town crafts convention.

Already familiar with the Bowman offspring (sulky, hormonal Rob, and Laurie, the size-14 chubbette), the neighbours, and the professional associates, the reader is now permitted to focus on Brenda and her sunny, converted workroom where the quilts take shape under her deft stitchery.

Having four years earlier won first prize in the Chicago Craft Show with the first quilt that she actually sold, Brenda is now “written up” with business cards of her own. While she has “no idea where the ideas came from,” the “satisfying orderliness” of her quilts has, in fact, spilled over from her basic philosophy, and she finds an odd satisfaction in piecing together these ideas.

But lately she has been experiencing a restlessness, a sense of opportunities missed that is personified in her latest undertaking, which she labels the “Unfinished Quilt” — an object with no real pattern, “only a cauldron of color.” In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, her flight schedule, for which she has cleared a space amid the clutter of her kitchen bulletin board, “looks purposeful and bright, winning from the welter of other items its small claim to priority.”

Once at the Franklin Arms in Philadelphia she finds herself forced to double up with a quilter she knows only by reputation, and what transpires challenges this “fairly conventional” woman’s notions of propriety.

While the dominant symbol for this novel is quilting, it is merely the frame to which the characters contribute both color and design. They achieve this through what they say, how they feel, and what they do about it, and the result is not unlike Brenda’s unfinished quilt. And yet, the reader is left with the impression that a crisis has been met and that somehow a fusion has occurred.

Like Brenda’s “Second Coming” quilt, which receives an Honorable Mention, this novel merits very special attention.