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A mazing party Larry's Party is the maze of one man's life by JULIET WATERS
But back in 1977, when the novel opens in Winnipeg, Larry Weller is hardly a typical guy. At 26, he's just finished his floral arts diploma at Red River College and has just scored his first job at Flowerfolks. He's fallen in love, for the first time, with Dorrie Shaw. But he's still living with his parents and grappling with a dark secret in their family history. Larry's mother, Dot, accidentally poisoned her mother-in-law with a jar of badly preserved beans. At the time, which was just before Larry's birth, the family was living in England. But when Larry's grandfather accuses Dot of intentionally murdering his wife, the young family is run out of town by the British tabloids. They move to Winnipeg, where Larry is raised to be as harmless as possible. But the passivity of Shields's hero is really a heavy suit of armour designed to protect him from a world in which there are no innocent mistakes. Early in his marriage to Dorrie, Larry starts getting "into mazes." On their honeymoon in England they visit Hampton Court and Larry gets pleasantly lost in the 17th-century garden maze. As Dorrie becomes a product of her place and times, a successful car saleswoman at Manitoba Motors, Larry begins a lifelong obsession with landscape mazes that will entirely reshape his life. While she remains "dopey smart" but narrow and suspicious of human intellect, Larry becomes increasingly eccentric. To reveal anything more about the story beyond this point would be something like handing someone a diagram of a brilliant and intricately designed maze with part of the solution already sketched in. Shields has already been praised for her talent with detail, but in Larry's Party she exhibit a genius for plot. Nothing that happens in this book is expected, and yet everything makes a weird magical sense. Whether Larry is an example of--or an example for--the men of his generation is up to the reader. But Shields is so conscientious about making her characters complex originals that by the end of this book one just wants to forget that there ever were such categories as "men" or "women." One wants to look back on the whole history of the sexes as though it were all just some terrible freak accident, like badly preserved beans. Larry's Party by Carol Shields, Random House, hc, 352pp., $31 |
Beth Prior, a character in Carol Shield's latest novel, defines herself as a third-wave feminist. She's "anxious to understand the mysteries of men as well as women." And judging from some advance reviews of Larry's Party, people seem anxious to read this novel as a solution to that mystery, or, as one reviewer puts it, "the story of man at the end of a long, rough ride."