SOURCE: Glover, Douglas. “Amiably Elegant Shields, Raw and Passionate York.” Canadian Forum 79, no. 890 (July/August 2000): 39-41.

In the following excerpt, Glover maintains that the stories in Dressing Up for the Carnival are elegantly written but ultimately lacking in depth.

Carol Shields's Dressing Up for the Carnival is a gentle, jocular, pixilated (the word comes from the old James Stewart movie Harvey about the rabbit only James Stewart can see) collection of short stories, some of which aren't exactly short stories in any conventional sense but rather riffs or variations on a theme or magical inventions or even sketches.

For example, the title piece is eight pages long and moves serially through ten different unrelated characters. Shields shows us each character starting his or her day, focusing on what she or he dresses up in for the carnival of life. Dressing up here isn't quite the right phrase—one...