Carol Shields Critical Essay | Critical Review by Olivia Glazebrook

Critical Review by Olivia Glazebrook

SOURCE: Glazebrook, Olivia. “A Bicycle Not Made for Two.” Spectator 285, no. 8978 (2 September 2000): 36-7.

In the following review, Glazebrook asserts that the two central characters in A Celibate Season are unsympathetic, and comments that the novel as a whole cannot overcome the limitations of the epistolary form.

A happily married couple are forced to live 1,000 miles apart for one year only. Can their marriage survive?

It may sound like a new fly-on-the-wall docudrama for Channel Four, but this, in fact, is the premise of A Celibate Season. Financial circumstances force Charles and Jocelyn—or ‘Chas’ and ‘Jock’, as they will have it—to separate: Jocelyn skips off to Ottawa to act as legal counsel for a commission studying ‘The Feminization of Poverty’, and Charles is left in Vancouver holding the baby—or, more accurately, the two teenagers. The pair spend nine months firing letters off to each other and...
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