Larry's Party
by Carol Shields
Summary
Larry Weller is a Winnipeg florist, an ordinary man by every available measure, and on his 1978 honeymoon he walks into the hedge maze at Hampton Court and comes out with the one unlikely passion of his life. The novel follows him from 1977 to 1997, a chapter per slice of years, each one picking up a single thread, Larry's work, Larry's clothes, Larry's love life, Larry's words, and walking it forward, so that his biography assembles the way a maze does, one turn at a time.
The life itself is deliberately unheroic. A first marriage to Dorrie Shaw ends after she bulldozes the maze he has planted in their front yard, an act of vandalism the book has real sympathy for. A second, to Beth Prior, a scholar of female saints, carries him to Chicago and into modest fame as a designer of garden labyrinths for people with money, and ends too, more quietly. Through it all Shields keeps asking her real question, which is what it is like to be an unremarkable man at the end of the twentieth century, when the old instructions have been withdrawn and nothing has replaced them.
The final chapter throws the dinner party of the title, seats both former wives at the table, and gives Larry, mid conversation, a sudden vision of the life in which he and Dorrie simply mended it.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, warm, exact and quietly formal.
Best for readers who want the ordinary examined with complete seriousness, by a writer who never condescends to her subject for a sentence.
Historical Context & Significance
Larry's Party won the Orange Prize in 1998, and there was a pleasing mischief in the choice: a prize founded to honour women's fiction going to the interior life of a mild Canadian man, written by the novelist who had just won the Pulitzer for The Stone Diaries, a woman's whole life told in the same patient close up. The two books read as a matched pair, and Shields did say that after so many novels about women's lives it was simply time to write about a man.
Kirkus praised the rare self assurance of a writer who knows from the first where her characters are going, which is the Shields effect in one line. Born in Chicago and settled in Canada, she published steadily for three decades, and her last novel, Unless, written while she was terminally ill, was shortlisted for every major prize going; she died in 2003. A musical of Larry's Party, with Brent Carver as Larry, was staged in Toronto in 2001, and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, founded in her name, now does for North America what the Orange Prize did for Britain.