SOURCE: Coates, Donna. “Re Marriage.” Canadian Literature, no. 164 (spring 2000): 175-76.

In the following review of Happenstance, Coates discusses the role of employment and work in the lives of the two central characters.

In a recent interview, Carol Shields confessed that she was “furious” when she came out of Four Weddings and a Funeral because “absolutely no one in that film had a job. People's work lives are written out of novels, too.” Shields never writes people's work lives out of her fiction, though; in Happenstance (1980) and A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982), re-issued as the two-volume set Happenstance: Two Novels in One about a Marriage in Transition (1991, 1994, 1997), work is a (pre)-occupation, one which she has continued to explore in The Stone Diaries (1993) and Larry's Party (1997). The clever packaging of Happenstance, apparently Shields' idea—the novels open from opposite sides, each upside down to the other—reflects her belief that...