Unless is a subtle and intelligently written novel which tackles the drama of ‘goodness’ as opposed to ‘greatness’, examining loss and suffering through the curious details of everyday life.

Reta Winters, aged 44, is a light fiction writer living in a small town near Toronto with her family. With a good-looking husband, a moderately successful literary reputation and a pleasant brood of daughters, her life seems blessed with the contentedness of ordinary life. Until, however, her oldest daughter Nora leaves university one day and takes up a solitary life on the streets in Toronto. Every day she sits in her retreated world like a vagabond, with a sign draped around her neck on which is written a single word: ‘Goodness’.

Throughout the novel are interspersed Reta’s imagined letters to other writers and strangers, who she feels have been in some way involved in the conspiracy against her daughter. Her feminist instincts blame the exclusion of women from the canon of ‘greatness’. She addresses male writers and critics for neglecting the importance of women. Reta tries to convince herself that Nora’s implosion is a realisation of her powerlessness. In a man’s world a woman can never be known as great. Such a realisation has made her daughter aware that all she can ever strive for is to be good.

In Reta, Shields has created a witty and wise narrator with enormous powers of observation. Her strength is creating a literary marvel out of the simple moment. Small things, such as Reta’s fixation with domestic cleaning, her coffee conversations with female friends, the discovery of a misplaced invitation behind the side table, lend colour and depth to the poignant commentaries on loss. One example is a wonderful scene where the narrator recalls shopping some years ago in Washington for a silk scarf for her oldest daughter. The agony and ecstasy of such an insignificant day becomes a momentous lesson about never getting what you want.

Shields’ dwelling on powerlessness strikes a chord but not because of the inequalities of womanhood. Rather, they speak to a more fundamental feeling in contemporary society of the inability to be great. Nora, the silent, unmoveable daughter is reminiscent of the self-destructive Merry in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Both are young women brought up in an optimistic household with the pleasures of western living, and yet both come to reject their parents and their comfortable lifestyles. Merry and Nora, with their delightfully feminine names, seemed trapped by their helplessness.

This is a quiet, searching novel, but it sometimes lacks moral weight. Shields is a fine writer and can create moments of genuine feeling but she does not hit hard with any strong resolution, except her unconvincing resentment at the treatment of women in the world. Like the narrator of the novel, she can do wonders with the smallest incident and memory but seems reluctant to go any further.