Larry's Party

Table of Contents

 

 

“Larry Weller emerges from this novel as a remarkably sympathetic, idiosyncratic human being, a male counterpart to the Everywoman Ms. Shields created in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Stone Diaries....
Using her fierce gift for observation, a natural storytelling talent, and a gently comic charm, she gives us a nicely tactile sense of Larry’s daily life, and by delving into the stream-of-consciousness rumble of Larry’s thoughts, she also gives us a vivid sense of his moods [and] his feelings.... It is an artful strategy that enables Shields to surprise the reader continually even as she infuses Larry’s story with the inevitability of real life.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

“One can feel the monumental force of Carol Shields’s mind here, turning over the cruel, sweet, answerless questions that have to be asked within the realm of a conscious life.”

—Gail Caldwell,
The Boston Globe

“Carol Shields deals in profound issues of human experience, drawing them from everyday existence with vulnerable honesty and a good dose of pain-killing humor.”

“[Carol Shields] reminds us again why literature matters.”

“What she finds she records with an archaeologist’s precision and a poet’s radiance, exposing to her readers—by way of a careful examination of her befuddled protagonist Larry Weller—some of the more salient features of late twentieth-century manhood.”

—R. C. Scott,
The Washington Times

“Shields works exquisitely with the notion of the maze as metaphor. Not only does Larry wander his own dizzyingly blind path in search of himself, but the writing itself continually twists and turns back on itself.... adding new weight and more nuance with each repeating.... Shields’s sparing use of scene-development then works powerfully to provide little explosions of revelation, almost the way you might suddenly round a corner in a maze and know kinesthetically that you are on the right path.... Shields is one of those rare writers who breaks the conventional rules of fiction and wins acclaim for it.”

“Vintage Shields—a luminous portrait of a life, composed in a daring, captivating narrative style.... [She roams] her characters’ emotional landscape and domestic travails with both unrelenting precision and boundless wonderment. There’s almost a spiritual quality to Shields’s sensibility: Her characters are creaturely, flawed ... but their presence is elegiac. Shields handles Larry with the assured touch of a classical oil painter.... A tone poem of the male soul.”

“An analysis of life’s intricacies, the labyrinths in which we find ourselves. It is a story of a single life’s movement backward and forward, spiraling sometimes in and out, up and down, and occasionally around in circles.”

—
The Columbia State

“The structure of Ms. Shields’s novel which moves forward in time, then back, in much the way that memory does, comes to seem mazelike in its intricacy, in interlocking pieces.”

—
The Dallas Morning News

“Larry’s Party
showcases the elegant phrasing and evocative imagery that render her work a rare treat.”

“This Cheeveresque work of adult entertainment looks like another winner for its author.... A book that page after page offers a great deal of pleasure.”

“Shields is brilliant on the aging process, sometimes painfully so, with each perfectly chosen phrase intimating the inevitability of death.”

“It is enchanting and vivid.... Larry is ordinary, but the respect and affection Shields gives him carried me happily through his middle, most lucky years.”

“Shields is an original, her insights delivered almost off-handedly but with superb pertinence, her irony often subtle, her humor indirect but extraordinarily keen.”

“An engaging work of fiction: funny, tender, poignant, and gracefully written.”

“Hats off to Larry, and to Shields. In this remarkable book, they win our hearts.”

“What a compelling writer Shields is: her nimble prose advances the saga of mild Larry as if it were a police story.... A lovely novel: as unassuming as Larry, as complex as his mazes.”

—
Express Books

“Very fine and real: Shields writes with the rare self-assurance of one who from the first knows where her characters are going and what will become of them once they arrive.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“This well-written, satisfying novel is replete with telling metaphors, memorable phrases, and gentle satire.”

“Triumphant.... The novel glows with Shields’s unsentimental optimism and her supple command of a sweetly ironic and graceful prose.”

Carol Shields is the author
The Stone Diaries,
which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Canada’s Governor General’s Award, and was a finalist for Britain’s Booker Prize. Her other novels and short-story collections include
The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Swann, The Orange Fish, Various Miracles, The Box Garden,
and
Small Ceremonies
(all available from Penguin). She lives in Winnipeg, Canada.

POETRY

 

NOVELS

Small Ceremonies
The Box Garden
Happenstance
A Fairly Conventional Woman
Swann
A Celibate Season
(written with Blanche Howard)
The Republic of Love
The Stone Diaries

 

STORY COLLECTIONS

 

PLAYS

 

CRITICISM

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pry) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First published in the United States ot America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1997 Published in Penguin Books 1998

 

Copyright © Carol Shields, 1997 All rights reserved

 

Chapter one of this novel first appeared in different form as “By Mistake” in
Prairie Fire,
Winnipeg, Canada.

 

The images on pages 1, 119, 143, 161, 183, 229, 247, and 263 are reproduced from
Celtic Design: Maze Patterns
by Aidan Meehan, Thames and Hudson, 1993. Used with permission.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-16043-5

I. Title.
PR9199.3.S514L37 1997
813’.54—dc21 97-11954

 

 

 

 

With thanks to a few men who have offered suggestions in the writing of this book: David Arnason, Tommy Banks, Tony Giardini, Jack Hodgins, Robin Hoople, Don Huband, Steve Hunt, Dayv James-French, the late Jim Keller, Joseph Krotz, Jake MacDonald, Brian MacKinnon, Don McCarthy, Bill Neville, Mark Morton, Doug Pepper, Gord Peters, John Ralston Saul, Donald Shields, John Shields, Ray Singer, Harry Strub and Max Wyman.

 

Thanks, too, to Maggie Dwyer and Jane Gralen and to the staff at the Winnipeg Public Library.

What is this mighty labyrinth - the earth, But a wild maze the moment of our birth?

By mistake Larry Weller took someone else’s Harris tweed jacket instead of his own, and it wasn’t till he jammed his hand in the pocket that he knew something was wrong.

His hand was traveling straight into a silky void. His five fingers pushed down, looking for the balled-up Kleenex from his own familiar worn-out pocket, the nickels and dimes, the ticket receipts from all the movies he and Dorrie had been seeing lately. Also those hard little bits of lint, like meteor grit, that never seem to lose themselves once they’ve worked into the seams.

This pocket - today’s pocket — was different. Clean, a slippery valley. The stitches he touched at the bottom weren’t his stitches. His fingertips glided now on a sweet little sea of lining. He grabbed for the buttons. Leather, the real thing. And something else - the sleeves were a good half inch longer than they should have been.

This jacket was twice the value of his own. The texture, the seams. You could see it got sent all the time to the cleaners. Another thing, you could tell by the way the shoulders sprang out that this jacket got parked on a thick wooden hanger at night. Above a row of polished shoes. Refilling its tweedy warp and woof with oxygenated air.