Roundabout

Carol Shields' Larry circles toward self-understanding

by Linda Lowenthal

LARRY'S PARTY, by Carol Shields. Viking, 306 pages, $22.95.

It takes a certain amount of courage, and certainly a lot of skill, to write novels about people who are just like anybody else. It's harder to make them interesting, and it's so easy to tell when the author gets it wrong. But Carol Shields pulled it off brilliantly in The Stone Diaries, her Pulitzer Prize-winning birth-to-death portrait of the seemingly unremarkable Daisy Goodwill Flett. And in her latest novel, Larry's Party, she creates a character who will inevitably be seen as that 20th-century Everywoman's male counterpart.

Larry Weller is, if anything, even more ordinary than Daisy Goodwill. He's not tormented but merely uncertain, the type of guy whose school clothes were always just slightly wrong. When the novel opens, in 1977, he's 26 years old and living in Winnipeg with his father, an upholsterer, and his mother, whose chief claim to fame is that she accidentally poisoned her mother-in-law with a serving of improperly canned beans. A rather aimless young man of no particular intellect, Larry landed in the field of floral design when his mother steered him toward a course at the local community college. Now he's working at a florist's shop, going to movies with his bargain-hunting girlfriend Dorrie, and "walking straight toward the next thing that was going to happen to him."

Yet this unprepossessing and apparently unimaginative soul finds success in the quirky specialty of designing garden mazes. He's drawn to these intricate labyrinths from the first moment he encounters one, on his honeymoon in England (he stumbles into marriage, when Dorrie gets pregnant, as passively as he stumbled into his line of work). "Who could have expected such height and density?" he wonders of the hedges that make up the Hampton Court maze. "And he hadn't anticipated the sensation of feeling unplugged from the world or the heightened state of panicked awareness that was, nevertheless, repairable." Soon he's poring over books on maze design, planting a crude labyrinth in his suburban yard, and -- a divorce, a remarriage, and a move later -- landing high-profile commissions as the head of a landscape-architecture firm called "A/Mazing Space Inc." If he hasn't conquered his tendency toward befuddlement, at least he's found a productive way to channel it.

Shields relates all this in an episodic format that's rather like a slide show. Each time the projector clicks, the scene has shifted, either subtly or radically. Indeed, most of the big events in Larry's life -- his marriages and divorces, his job changes, the birth of his child -- occur off-screen. But the flashback narration more than fills in the gaps. Each episode suggests, in its comprehensiveness, a new way to begin the story. Characters are reintroduced, events retold, in a way that raises no unsettling existential questions -- the facts never change -- but does make the emotional resolution progressively sharper. The first time we hear about the birth of Larry's son, for example, it's happened between chapters, a fait accompli that he -- and we -- must simply accept. Later, in a chapter that unfolds backward from the boy's early adolescence to the discovery of Dorrie's pregnancy, Larry is right there, cutting the umbilical cord: "Happiness rose in his throat like a song. . . . Then he knew, suddenly, what being a father meant. That savage desire to protect. To watch out for danger."

It can't be denied that there's something a little book-clubby about all this -- the self-conscious structure, the elaborate central metaphor, the omnipresent sense that the author is Doing Something (but nothing that can't be unraveled in a pleasantly stimulating group discussion over coffee). Yet Shields is not out to show off, or to play tricks on anyone. Her gift has always been to create characters who seem capable of existing outside the book's covers. In earlier novels, such as the wonderful The Republic of Love, she achieved this by making herself invisible as a writer; in The Stone Diaries, her heroine's "reality" became an over-the-top conceit, right down to the family pictures bound into the volume. In Larry's Party, she's more like an Impressionist painter -- emotional accuracy, rather than photorealism, is the goal.

In the book's title chapter, the story finally catches up with real time, and Larry's past catches up with him: both his ex-wives come to town on the same weekend, and he (egged on by his new girlfriend) seizes on the uncomfortable coincidence as the perfect excuse to give his first proper dinner party. The slide show gives way to live-action cinematography as the party chatter swirls about, often to hilarious effect. By the time it's all over, his life has take one of those turns that leave introspective humans wondering not so much what will happen next as what future selves will think when they look back.

"The whole thing about mazes," Larry tells his scholarly second wife, "is that they make perfect sense only when you look down on them from above." A man's life does not make perfect sense even then, but the futility of trying to discern a logical pattern has never stopped anyone from trying. What finally makes Larry real, for all the visible brushstrokes, is his relentless yet inconclusive circling toward self-understanding. Those of us who can't help trying to impose narrative order on our own lives will unavoidably be drawn in by his.