Larry's Party
Carol Shields
Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE - Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller 1977
CHAPTER TWO - Larry’s Love 1978
CHAPTER THREE - Larry’s Folks 1980
CHAPTER FOUR - Larry’s Work 1981
CHAPTER FIVE - Larry’s Words 1983
CHAPTER SIX - Larry’s Friends 1984
CHAPTER SEVEN - Larry’s Penis 1986
CHAPTER EIGHT - Larry Inc. 1988
CHAPTER NINE - Larry So Far 1990
CHAPTER TEN - Larry’s Kid 1991
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Larry’s Search for the Wonderful and the Good 1992
CHAPTER TWELVE - Larry’s Threads 1993-4
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Men Called Larry 1995
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Larry’s Living Tissues 1996
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Larry’s Party 1997
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
Praise for Larry’s Party
“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.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[Carol Shields] reminds us again why literature matters.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“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.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“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.”
--The San Diego Union-Tribune
“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.”
—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“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.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Shields is brilliant on the aging process, sometimes painfully so, with each perfectly chosen phrase intimating the inevitability of death.”
—Miami Herald
“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.”
—The Seattle Times
“Shields is an original, her insights delivered almost off-handedly but with superb pertinence, her irony often subtle, her humor indirect but extraordinarily keen.”
—Vermont Sunday Magazine
“An engaging work of fiction: funny, tender, poignant, and gracefully written.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Hats off to Larry, and to Shields. In this remarkable book, they win our hearts.”
—The Hartford Courant
“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.”
—Library Journal
“Triumphant.... The novel glows with Shields’s unsentimental optimism and her supple command of a sweetly ironic and graceful prose.”
—Publishers Weekly
PENGUIN BOOKS
LARRY’S PARTY
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.
To request Penguin Readers Guides by mail (while supplies last), please call (800) 778-6425 or write to:
Penguin Marketing, Dept. CC
Readers Guides Requests-B
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
THE WORK OF CAROL SHIELDS
POETRY
Others
Intersect
Coming to Canada
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
Various Miracles
The Orange Fish
PLAYS
Arrivals and Departures
Thirteen Hands
CRITICISM
Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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ORL, England
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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
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Joseph, Nicholas, and Sofia
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?
(“Reflections on Walking in
the Maze at Hampton Court”
British Magazine, 1747)
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 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.
He should have run back to the coffee shop to see if his own jacket was still scrunched there on the back of his chair, but it was already quarter to six, and Dorrie was expecting him at six sharp, and it was rush hour and he wasn’t anywhere near the bus stop.
And - the thought came to him - what’s the point? A jacket’s a jacket. A person who patronizes a place like Cafe Capri is almost asking to get his jacket copped. This way all that’s happened is a kind of exchange.
Forget the bus, he decided. He’d walk. He’d stroll. In his hot new Harris tweed apparel. He’d push his shoulders along, letting them roll loose in their sockets. Forward with the right shoulder, bam, then the left shoulder coming up from behind. He’d let his arms swing wide. Fan his fingers out. Here comes the Big Guy, watch out for the Big Guy.
The sleeves rubbed light across the back of his hands, scratchy but not too scratchy.
And then he saw that the cuff buttons were leather too, a smaller-size version of the main buttons, but the same design, a sort of cross-pattern like a pecan pie cut in quarters, only the slices overlapped this little bit. You could feel the raised design with your finger, the way the four quadrants of leather crossed over and over each other, their edges cut wavy on the inside margin. These waves intersected in the middle, dived down there in a dark center and disappeared. A black hole in the button universe. Zero.
Quadrant was a word Larry hadn’t even thought of for about ten years, not since geometry class, grade eleven.
The color of the jacket was mixed shades of brown, a strong background of freckled tobacco tones with subtle orange flecks. Very subtle. No one would say: hey, here comes this person with orange flecks distributed across his jacket. You’d have to be one inch away before you took in those flecks.
Orange wasn’t Larry’s favorite color, at least not in the clothing line. He remembered he’d had orange swim trunks back in high school, MacDonald Secondary, probably about two sizes too big, since he was always worrying at that time in his life about his bulge showing, which was exactly the opposite of most guys, who made a big point of showing what they had. Modesty ran in his family, his mum, his dad, his sister, Midge, and once modesty gets into your veins you’re stuck with it. Dorrie, on the other hand, doesn’t even shut the bathroom door when she’s in there, going. A different kind of family altogether.
He’d had orange socks once too, neon orange. That didn’t last too long. Pretty soon he was back to white socks. Sports socks. You got a choice between a red stripe around the top, a blue stripe, or no stripe at all. Even geeks like Larry and his friend Bill Herschel, who didn’t go in for sports, they still wore those thick cotton sports socks every single day. You bought them three in a pack and they lasted about a week before they fell into holes. You always thought, hey, what a bargain, three pairs of socks at this fantastic price!
White socks went on for a long time in Larry’s life. A whole era.
Usually he didn’t button a jacket, but it just came to him as he was walking along that he wanted to do up one of those leather buttons, the middle one. It felt good, not too tight over the gut. The guy must be about his own size, 40 medium, which is lucky for him. If, for example, he’d picked up Larry’s old jacket, he could throw it in the garbage tomorrow, but at least he wasn’t walking around Winnipeg with just his shirt on his back. The nights got cool this time of year. Rain was forecast too.
A lot of people don’t know that Harris tweed is virtually waterproof. You’d think cloth this thick and woolly would soak up water like a sponge, but, in actual fact, rain slides right off the surface. This was explained to Larry by a knowledgeable old guy who worked in menswear at Hector’s. That would be, what, nine, ten years ago, before Hector’s went out of business. Larry could tell that this wasn’t just a sales pitch. The guy — he wore a lapel button that said “Salesman of the Year” - talked about how the sheep they’ve got over there are covered with special long oily hair that repels water. This made sense to Larry, a sheep standing out in the rain day and night. That was his protection.
Dorrie kept wanting him to buy a khaki trenchcoat, but he doesn’t need one, not with his Harris tweed. You don’t want bulk when you’re walking along. He walks a lot. It’s when he does his thinking. He hums his thoughts out on the air like music; they’ve got a disco beat: My name is Larry Weller. I’m a floral designer, twenty-six years old, and I’m walking down Notre Dame Avenue, in the city of Winnipeg, in
the country of Canada, in the month of April, in the year 1977, and I’m thinking hard. About being hungry, about being late, about having sex later on tonight. About how great I feel in this other guy’s Harris tweed jacket.
Cars were zipping along, horns honking, trucks going by every couple of seconds, people yelling at each other. Not a quiet neighborhood. But even with all the noise blaring out, Larry kept hearing this tiny slidey little underneath noise. He’d been hearing it for the last couple of minutes. Whoosh, wash, whoosh, wash. It was coming out of the body of Larry J. Weller. It wasn’t that he found it objectionable. He liked it, as a matter of fact, but he just wanted to know what it was.
He whooshed past the Triple Value Store, past the Portuguese Funeral Home, past Big Mike’s where they had their windows full of ski equipment on sale. The store was packed with people wearing spring clothes, denim jackets, super-flare pants, and so on, but they were already thinking ahead to next winter. They had snow in their heads instead of a nice hot beach. That’s one thing Larry appreciates about Dorrie. She lives in the moment. When it’s snowing she thinks about snow. When it’s spring, like right now, she’s thinking about getting some new sandals. That’s what she’s doing this very minute: buying sandals at Shoes Express, their two-for-one sale. Larry knows she’s probably made up her mind already, but she told him she’d wait till he got to the store before buying. She wants to make sure Larry likes what she decides on, even though sandals are just sandals to him. Just a bunch of straps.
