February 12, 2025

The Box Garden, by Carol Shields

Expectations weren’t huge for my reread of Carol Shields’ sophomore novel, THE BOX GARDEN. As I mentioned in my January essay about my 2025 reading projects (rereading the works of Carol Shields is one of them!), I recalled her noting somewhere that she regretted the overwrought plotting of the book (there is a high stakes element near the end that seems incongruous with the tension of the rest of the novel). I’d also been underwhelmed upon my most recent read of her first novel, SMALL CEREMONIES, which I’d really admired when I first read it a while back, but whose plot is almost UNDERwrought, its flimsiness apparent as I now knew all the twists and turns and there was not much to the story that was left after that (except that this is a Carol Shields, book, so even the dust motes are magic, which I need to say, because strangers keep leaving scolding comments admonishing me for my audacity to critique the works of beloved writers. I will add that part of really loving a writer and engaging with their work is reading with a clear eye, being able to understand what works and what doesn’t, and also it’s just a more interesting way for me to read.)

The Box Garden made no impression on me when I read it before. A search on my blog reveals that I never wrote about it, except for a reference to a review by Barbara Amiel who’d said that this book and others like it, with their focuses on the lives of ordinary people, “will be the undoing of contemporary literature,” and—as she was about many things—Barbara Amiel was wrong about that. I suspect that this story—about a woman approaching her forties, considering her divorce, single motherhood, reflecting on her relationship with her own mother as she travels from her home in Vancouver to her mother’s suburban bungalow in Scarborough, Ontario, for her mother’s unexpected wedding, thinking about mid-life, about old age—didn’t resonate with me when I was younger and didn’t properly understand how many lives a life contains, but I get it now. The mystery of how we got from there to here, Shields’ Charleen seemingly untethered from the many selves she’s been, but needing to get them all into some kind of order if she’s ever going to be ready to move forward with her life. An ordinary life is always an odyssey.

There’s also an uncanny bit of prescience in the novel, the book’s title coming from a box that Charleen receives from a somewhat mystical correspondent containing a tray, a bag of earth, and some grass seed. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the first known use of the expression “touch grass” was in 2016, an expression that’s about connecting with a tangible reality (as opposed to being on the internet), but in 1977, Shields was writing about it literally: “I…like to run my hand over its springy tightly-shaved surface, loving its tufted healthy carpet-thick threads, the way it struggles against the sides of the box, the industry with which it mends itself,” and the man who’d sent the package had been writing about the sociology of grass, he had “a theory about the importance of grass to human happiness.”

The reader is meant to find the entire project a little bit out-there, but there is also something to it, which Carol Shields always knew, even if Barbara Amiel didn’t. That life (and even literature) can be about the small scale, about the details, about the wonder inherent in something as simple as grass, regarded blade by blade