The Stone Diaries marked a new phase in a literary career already ablaze with achievement. As well as the many international awards it received, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Governor General's Award, the book also met with universal critical acclaim and topped bestseller lists around the world. "Carol Shields," raved Maclean's, "has crafted a small miracle of a novel." "The Stone Diaries," said the New York Times Book Review, "reminds us again why literature matters."
The San Diego Tribune called The Stone Diaries "a universal study of what makes women tick." Now, in Larry's Party, Carol Shields does the same for men.
Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony and tenderness. Larry's Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash backward and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the new millennium, adapting to society's changing expectations of men, Shields' elegant prose transforms the trivial into the momentous. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, his interactions with parents, friends and a son. And throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes -- so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the seventies, the blind enchantment of the eighties and the lean, mean nineties, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search for self.
Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy and faultless wisdom.
"Shields' fiction - intricately plotted machines with ordinary people as the moving parts-seems so modestly designed to give pleasure and diversion, it's easy to underestimate the artistry.... Shields has taken her place alongside such Canadian writers as Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood." - The Globe and Mail
"Even better than The Stone Diaries.... Shields is brilliant." - The Vancouver Sun
"No more richly satisfying novel, to my knowledge, has been published this year.... In guiding her hero through his maze, Shields demonstrates once again her supreme mastery of emotional geometry." - The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)
"Larry's Party is a celebration of manhood, a gently humorous look at the last decades of this century, and a loving embrace of all our muddled lives. Anyone who reads this book will look at their own lives with renewed affection." - Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of The Cure for Death by Lightning Carol Shields (1935—2003) is the author of The Stone Diaries, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Canada's Governor General's Award. Her other novels and short story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, and Swann. Shields's work has been translated into 33 languages. Chapter One
Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller
1977
By mistake Larry Weller took someone else's Harris tweed jacket instead of his own, and it wasn't until 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 grip, that never seem to lose themselves once they've worked into the seams.
This pocket -- today's pocket -- was different. Clean, a slippery valley.
