The Stone Diaries

Ever loyal 42nd Page reader RCH sends us the forty-second page of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Stone Diaries,” where author Carol Shields wrote (emphasis added by RCH):

His voice is beautiful. Its texture is fine-woven wool. If it had a color it would be a warm chestnut. In tone, in fluidity, in resonance, it is all that a man's voice should be, with just that hint of Scottish bur, thinner than the skin of varnish on his oak lectern, giving necessary hardness. He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance.

As it is, they keep their eyes fixed on him, focusing especially on his handsome, sorrowing, scholarly mouth, bending their heads only when it becomes necessary to write down the lists of words he unspools for them: the parts of a particular flower: pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle. Often he uses the blackboard, but today, having forgotten to bring his chalks along, he sketches these shapes in the air. His long fingers open and close around the airy forms. What a pity his shirt cuffs are in such a state, and it looks as though—yes, definitely—there is a button missing from his left sleeve; but he is oblivious to its absence—which is precisely what his female students find so compelling in Professor Barker T. Flett, his fine manly gift for self-forgetfulness.

The time is autumn, 1916, and twelve out of the fourteen students enrolled in Introductory Botany are young women. The men of Wesley College, all except for Edward Wood, an epileptic, and tiny misshapen Clarence Redfield—forty-eight inches high with one foot bent out sideways—have put on the uniform of the Dominion and gone to war. Why is it that Professor Flett is not himself away fighting at the front?

More information about “The Stone Diaries” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble

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