Product Description

At 26, Larry Weller thinks his future lies in flowers. He still lives at home, has a new career as a floral designer, and a girlfriend about whom he is somewhat ambivalent. What Larry is about to discover is that life is never a straightforward path. His girlfriend becomes pregnant. They marry and set off for their honeymoon in England where Larry stumbles upon what will become his greatest passion in life. He takes up the creation and construction of meticulous mazes, which leads him down blind alleys and dead ends, failed marriages and changing expectations. It all comes together in an unforgettable dinner party in this warm and witty coming-of-middle-age novel. Published four years after The Stone Diaries, Larry's Party won the UK's Orange Prize for fiction and is one of Carol Shields's most critically successful works. Published in numerous editions by Penguin, the book has now sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States alone. This audio recording, first released in audiocassette Canada in 1998, received wide critical acclaim in its original edition. Quill and Quire said that "this recording benefits from Thomson's cool, well-trained voice. There are no lilting cadences here, or perfectly affected accents, just immaculate timing and phrasing." Atlantic Books Today called this audio edition of Larry's Party "a quietly rhythmic, almost hypnotic reading. . . . Thomson, who advocates challenging theatre-goers, brings the same kind of respect for his audience to his interpretation." This new BTC edition, scheduled for US release in November, marks the first time this recording has been released in the US in any form and brings to life a work of complex fiction about an ordinary guy whose appearance belies a truly human complexity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #554694 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-27
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

From Amazon.com
Larry Weller is a regular guy, or so Carol Shields has him think. When we first meet him in 1977 Winnipeg at age 26, he's pondering the pluses of Harris tweed, still living at home, and realizing he's in love with his girlfriend, Dorrie, a flinty car saleswoman. Larry is proud of his job at Flowerfolks, even though he fell into floral design by accident, and if his relationship with his parents isn't perfect, it's not too bad, either. (Stu and Flo Weller may have less page-time in Larry's Party, but they are hugely memorable. He is a master upholsterer, happiest when working; she is a woman ruined by nervous guilt, having inadvertently killed off her mother-in-law with some improperly preserved green beans.)

Carol Shields has said that she had "always been struck by the fact that in most novels people aren't working." Though her hero climbs the floral managerial trellis for 17 years and finds more rhapsody in work than marriage, Larry and Dorrie's honeymoon in England points him toward what will be his true vocation--mazes. These living constructs turn him into a thinker, a man of imagination, and the author's descriptions are quietly spectacular as well as effortlessly sweet. Larry wonders at their "teasing elegance and circularity ... a snail, a scribble, a doodle on the earth's skin with no other directed purpose but to wind its sinuous way around itself." Just as Larry changes with the times--each elliptical chapter ages him by one or two years--so does his art. In 1990, he designs a maze in which you can't really lose yourself. In 1997, the McCord Maze "is intended to mirror the descent into unconscious sleep, followed by a slow awakening." Larry, too, has a slow awakening, taking several false turns before reaching midlife. As the novel closes, with a bravura dinner party scene, he may finally be at ease in the world. But his creator knows that he is only halfway there, and still has to negotiate his way from the center of the maze to its exit.

From Library Journal
Shields (winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Stone Diaries, LJ 5/15/96) narrated the abridged version of her novel (Audio Reviews, LJ 11/1/97), while here another woman reads Harry Weller's uneventful life. Alyssa Bresnahan gives a perceptive characterization of this 20th-century Everyman. Although the story describes Harry's everyday life in intimate detail, even to the number of fillings in his teeth and shoes in his closet, it is his work that is the heart of the book. Harry designs mazes for gardens; they are his passion as well as his profession. They are, in his words, "refuges from confusion, an orderly path for the persevering." Even Harry's life is consistent. As if in a maze, he follows sharp turns and false trails until he emerges triumphant in the center. It is then, in 1997, that Harry Weller?age 47?gives a party to celebrate his birthday, brilliantly described by Shields in a manner worthy of Virginia Woolf. A memorable experience. Recommended.?Jo Carr, Sarasota, FL
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
In this chronicle of Larry's adult life--from his first honeymoon to the first party he ever hosted--the cast include both ex-wives, his current girlfriend, his frank sister, and assorted males. The gentle, melancholy Larry specializes in creating garden mazes, a passion symbolizing his existential preoccupations. This prize-winning book belongs to the particularly Canadian genre concerned with wishy-washy losers, more insightful than most but no more consequential. Its watery blood gains considerable substance in the mouth of R.H. Thomson. His seemingly simple conversational reading is empathetic, engaging, masterfully understated, and, while never theatrical or flashy, intricate in the virtuosity of his technique. Every syllable tells. It's like a pot of consommé, the delicate flavors of which dance in the pallet when just the right amount of narrator's salt is added. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Wonderful
I've read most of Shields' books and taught a few, but this is my absolute favourite. It's a charming yet completely believable tale of one man's life. Read it if you need to have your faith restored in humanity.

A story of a life lived and observed
Carol Shields has a way of writing about the ordinary that elevates it to the sublime. We follow Larry, an ordinary guy, through his life through jumps in time of several years at a leap. Through the chapters, we follow him through a callow youth, through a first marriage and parenthood, divorce, his parents and sister's relationships with him and each other, remarriage and re-divorce, and most central to the book, his mundane job and rise to stellar status in his field of maze designer, of all things. But of course the maze is a metaphor for the complexities of life, trying to find ones way in the world. The dinner party at the end is clearly meant to represent the 'goal,' the center of the maze, but it's left to the readers to decide if Larry is likely to find his way out again.
A lovely tour de force.

A gem, emotionally and stylistically.
Like so many of us, Larry Weller finds himself, on occasion, lost. Is that why he is drawn to the arcane profession of maze-making? Or is his fascination with mazes a reflection of his deepening intellect and development as a man?

In the course of fifteen carefully observed chapters, Carol Shields examines the maze-like Life of Larry. Each chapter is like a short film in which Shields refocuses her lens on a specific aspect of Larry's life: "Larry's Words," "Larry's Love," "Larry's Kid," etc. The end result is an in-depth portrait of a multi-dimensional guy, a compendium of details that elevates the seemingly ordinary Larry into someone utterly unique. She follows him through college (actually a trade school for florists), through the courtship of his first wife, through disillusionments and deaths, and finally to the party of the title, in which many of his life's loose ends are resolved.

This is deep, smart, resonant writing, a subtly cajoling book that satisfies and delights.