The title piece of Dressing Up For The Carnival, the third anthology from the Pulitzer-winning author of The Stone Diaries, is a frothy confection, residing midway between a vignette and an essay examining the transfiguring role of props and costumes in everyday life. Carol Shields skips lightly among unrelated characters, showing how their clothes or the unaccustomed objects they carry—a big brother's football helmet, the boss' baby carriage, a mango bought on impulse—alter how they visualize themselves and how strangers react to them in passing. It's a pleasantly abstract, beautifully described conceit that goes nowhere, ultimately running aground in the idle thoughts of a man peeking out his window while wearing his wife's nightgown. Not all of the 22 "stories" in Dressing Up For The Carnival are as breezy or experimental, but virtually all are unorthodox, stylized genre-leapers, and most slide to the same sort of oblique, understated conclusion. Many contain a kernel of cogent truth about the associations between events and emotions, between the subjective and the objective, but those kernels are well-hidden beneath a calculated layer of metaphor, description, and artificial construction. The results are notably mixed. Some of Shields' pieces are stiff and overly mannered: "Absence," a circumlocutory lipocomp written without the letter "i," becomes a multilevel pun on identity and on fiction written without the inescapable author's self. Others are both clever and astutely crafted, such as "Ilk," which subtly suggests associations between its characters even as they themselves discuss and dismiss fictional constructs that permit such associations. Either way, Shields' works are perfectly readable on a surface level as whimsical flights of fancy about ordinary people who let their inner worlds define their outer lives. But determined searchers will find buried treasure in Dressing Up For The Carnival: an entire secret dialectic on the nature of reality.