Larry's Party by Carol Shields

I picked up this novel knowing some people consider it inferior to her first work, The Stone Diaries. She won a Pulitzer Prize for that one, after all, so it is natural that Larry's Party is little less brilliant.

And in fact I did like this book less, since it isn't as poetic and it is a more conceptual in its structure. I did enjoy the structure though, especially when ... oh, but I'd better not say when, exactly. Just trust me on this one.

So here again we have an existential novel about someone's life, but instead of spanning an entire lifetime with a few generations tossed in, we basically follow our hero Larry around during his adult life. He is an average guy, which is where the poetry about him becomes less likely, less moving than the pathos of Daisy in the Stone Diaries. But he is hyper-realistic, particularly in his profession - moving from florist to the designer of fabulous mazes. I am not sure why I am always convinced that characters with obsessive behaviour are especially realistic but there it is.

Sometimes when reading books by men with female characters at the fore I get irritated easily, and I was anticipating that as a problem here in the reverse. But her grasp of male thinking worked for me with one exception - recurring descriptive passages of Larry's clothes and shoes. It didn't quite click for me, Larry's musings about his jacket or his shoes.

But it is a worthwhile novel that carries you from beginning to end and which proves that even the most unlikely subjects are interesting to us when the books are well written.

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