[Below, Sherman offers a mixed review of The Stone Diaries.]

A single question sits at the heart of all Carol Shields' fiction: How can we ever truly understand another person's life? In Swann, a scholar tries to explain how a simple Kingston farm wife managed to write a slim volume of unaccountably fine poetry. In Small Ceremonies, a biographer with "an unhealthy lust for the lives of other people" rummages through the house she's rented to learn all she can about the absent owners.

In The Stone Diaries, Shields examines the evidence of a woman's life the way a geologist might study fossils. Each piece is excavated and meticulously scrutinized by relatives and friends in an attempt to construct a credible version of the past, telling a story that sweeps back and forth across a century and several generations.

Much of that narrative material will be familiar to admirers of the author's nine previous works of fiction, rich in domestic detail and intelligent compassion for her characters. Here, Shields seems to be striving for something grander. Along with her attempt to solve the mysteries of a single life is the intention to reflect the moral complexities of an age. But in the end, Daisy Goodwill's tiny secrets and personal disappointments cannot bear the strain of the novel's high ambitions and overbearing technique.

The material is simply arranged in a series of milestones, chapters from Birth, 1905 to Death, 1985. Six generations of Goodwills and Fletts are shown on a detailed family tree, and there are eight pages of family photographs—men and women, young and old, dressed in bustles and bathing suits. One bright-eyed teen-ager, identified as "Lissa Taylor," born 1974, looks remarkably like the author herself.

What are we to think? Is Daisy Goodwill the real mother, or grandmother, of Carol Shields? Is this the story of her own family? A work of biography, autobiography, or fiction? Or is it, perhaps, all three, real and imagined events shuffled together, storytelling for "the documentary age" which, according to Shields, "can never get enough facts"?

Daisy's birth is brutal and unexpected. Her father, Cuyler Goodwill, a limestone cutter in rural Manitoba, doesn't know that Mercy, his bulky, kind-hearted wife, is pregnant. Neither, it seems, does she. One summer in 1905, in the presence of a neighbour and a passing Jewish pedlar, she falls to the kitchen floor, gives birth to a baby girl, and dies. Daisy is handed over to the neighbour, Mrs. Clarentine Flett, who moves to Winnipeg to live with her son Barker, a professor of botany, the man destined to marry the little girl he helps to raise.

Alone with his grief, Cuyler Goodwill erects a giant tower above his wife's grave, carving each piece of limestone with a hieroglyph illustrating their love. This rough-hewn Taj Mahal attracts sightseers from the city and brings him a lucrative job offer from a limestone company in Indiana.

Carol Shields loves characters like Cuyler, people able to create something beautiful in otherwise humdrum lives. Mrs. Flett, too, has the gift. She transforms her Winnipeg garden into a showplace and makes money selling flowers until she is struck and killed by a careless delivery boy.

When Cuyler takes his six-year-old daughter to the United States, he becomes obsessed with telling her his life story. "He felt, rightly, that he owed her a complete accounting for his years of absence. Owed her the whole story, his life prised out of the fossil field and brought up to light." Daisy, unfortunately, never finds her own voice, or it seems, her own face; her picture is notably absent from the family album. She passes through life like a baffled spectator, "outside events," something of a puzzle to her friends, a child to her husband, a shadow-figure to her own children. To her son she's simply a middle-class woman of moderate intelligence, a housewife who inherited her husband's gardening column and became, briefly, Mrs. Green Thumb. One of her daughters, sitting beside her deathbed, wants to ask her mother (but knows she mustn't), "Have you been happy in your life?"

Two world wars, the Depression, Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, and the birth of the Dionne quintuplets all flicker in the background of this domestic story. But large events play little part in Daisy's life. Far more important are the accumulated lists her children discover after her death, traces of her life in a series of messages—things to be done, the garden club luncheon menu, addresses, illnesses. "The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course," Shields writes. "I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted."

Real life, unlike fiction, is messy and haphazard, explanations often elusive. But Shields hates loose ends; as a novelist (or biographer) she's overly eager to tie all the bits together. She takes too seriously the advice attributed to Chekhov; a gun pulled out in the first act must be fired by the third. The delivery boy, for example, who accidentally killed Clarentine Flett, returns as a guilt-ridden millionaire meatpacker who erects a glass-domed horticultural conservatory bearing his victim's name. We even pick up the story of the pedlar who witnessed Daisy's birth.

To hold our interest in Daisy's life and to extend the story's range, Shields inflates her language. She pumps up the metaphors until, literally and figuratively, no stone is left unturned. Despite its ambition and the Booker Prize nomination, The Stone Diaries fails in its attempt to break new ground.