Dressing up For the Carnival - Hardcover

This is the third short story collection from the prize-winning Canadian novelist Carol Shields. It is neatly enwrapped by two stories involving clothes: the title story, in which a cast of characters stride out into the day and "Dressing Down" about a nudist whose wife enjoys the comfort of layers. In "Dressing for the Carnival", a delightfully anti-climactic tale, Tamara dresses in yellow, without checking the weather, for "her clothes are the weather, as powerful in their sunniness as the strong, muzzy early morning light." Only X, an anonymous middle-aged man, stays indoors, dancing in his wife's nightie and watching "cycles of consolation and enhancement" from afar.

In "Dressing Down", the vigorous nudist and his wife separate and the story captures her final poignant gesture towards amends. In the hilarious "Invention", a husband is left behind when his wife finds fame after inventing the steering wheel muff and the narrator traces an ancestral line of inventors including a shepherd who discovered day-dreaming and others who developed the hyphen, word space and full-stop. This story brings together the main concerns of this collection: the investigation of long-term intimacies of people who inhabit "parallel weather systems" and a self-conscious teasing of the short story form. In "A Scarf", a failed writer who's eschewed "beginnings, middles and ends" for a feminist structure ends up removing her navel by plastic surgery after an unkind remark by her husband. Her friend fails to articulate the truth about a misunderstanding and realises that not one woman in her life "was going to get what we wanted..." and remained "too kind ... not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want." In "Ilk", a polished and wry spoof on academic musings about "buds of narrativity", a young untenured professor wonders where she stands on "narrative enclosures". A jammed vowel key in "Absence", forces the writer to complete the story without the use of this letter and creates a clever literary pun. One of the best stories is "Windows", in which two artists struggle against a new government tax on glass and have to paint in artificial light until they resolve their light-less gloom through art itself.

A provocative, tricky and often serious collection which asks profound questions of short fiction and love's mechanisms for survival.--Cherry Smyth

"[Shields is] a witty, whimsical, playful writer...a devious literary chameleon...Each step along the route is a surprise, and each character is a memorable creation whose keys unlock more than anyone may suspect." The New York Times Book