The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Larry's Party by Carol ShieldSally E. Perry
Carol Shields. Larry’s Party. Viking, 1997. 339 pp. $23.95.
George F. Babbitt meet Larry Weller. Larry is the eponymous hero of Carol Shields’s new novel, an ordinary guy from a lower-middle-class background who rises during the course of the narrative from a clerk in a florist’s shop to a master maze-maker. Like Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist, Larry learns about himself through his relationships with others, as well as through his material possessions.
Larry’s Party is a novel of character. We meet his parents, his first wife Dorrie, his son Ryan, his second wife Beth, and his lover Charlotte, as well as several of his friends. Through these people and through the chapters which focus on various parts of his life—his work, his “threads,” his penis, his living tissue, and his incorporation into an independent businessman— readers watch his development from a callow youth, experimenting with love, to a middle-aged man recovering from a serious bout with encephalitis and enduring a midlife crisis. The party of the title brings together his wives, lover, sister, and friends in a way that shows the tensions inherent in these relationships, but also the affection that drew them together.
Mazes serve as the governing symbol for Larry’s journey through life and the occupation which moves from personal obsession during his first honeymoon to apprenticing with a maze designer, and finally becoming a highly thought-of independent designer and builder. Different ones also grace the beginning of each chapter. The novel seems to suggest that despite the twists and turns that a person’s life may take, there is a way out once the pattern is discovered. The novel rings true as a saga of the extraordinarily ordinary Larry. [Sally E. Parry]