Larry's Party

Larry’s Party (1997), a novel by Canadian author Carol Shields, narrates a series of episodes in the life of “ordinary man made extraordinary” Larry Weller, who achieves wealth and renown as a designer of ornamental mazes while struggling to understand the mystery of his existence. Larry’s Party won the 1998 Orange Prize for Fiction and has been adapted as a musical. Shields, who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries, is widely regarded as one of Canada’s most important novelists.

Each chapter of the novel is set two or three years after the last, spanning the years 1976 – 1997. At the same time, each chapter also focuses on a single aspect of Larry’s life. Chapter titles include “Larry’s Threads,” “Larry’s Penis,” and “Larry’s Party.”

When the novel opens in 1976, Larry is twenty-six. Walking from a coffee shop to a meeting with his girlfriend, Dorrie Shaw, Larry realizes that he has taken a stranger’s tweed jacket from the shop instead of his own. As he debates what to do, we learn the details of his life.



Larry is the son of Stu and Dot Weller, who immigrated to Canada from England under sad circumstances while Dot was pregnant with Larry. He was an unhappy, sexually-shy teenager, enduring “the honking embarrassment of being Larry Weller,” while dreaming of Megsy Hicks’s “hard, sweatered breast.”

When he wrote to Red River College requesting a brochure for their Furnace Repair course, they sent him “Flower Design” instead, so that’s what he studied. At “flower college,” Larry had his first sexual experience, with a fellow student: ''That she would look at him at all seemed an act of kindness, that she would offer him a course in sexual first aid seemed a miracle.''

Still living at home, Larry works arranging flowers at a Winnipeg shop called Flowerfolks. As his thoughts turn to Dorrie, Larry realizes that he loves her.



The next chapter jumps forward to 1978. Larry and Dorrie marry and honeymoon in England. While visiting the maze at Hampton Court Palace, Larry realizes that the maze’s twists and turns excite him deeply: “getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point.” He allows himself to become more and more lost, having something like a revelatory experience, a sense that he is not, as he has always believed, “a man of limited imagination and few choices.”

In 1980, Larry invites his folks over to the house where he lives with Dorrie and their newborn son, Ryan. He is holding a picnic to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. Since his experience at Hampton Court, Larry has become fascinated by mazes, delighting in the new, obscure vocabulary of maze-building: “Turf mazes, shepherd's race, Julian's bower, knot garden, Jerusalem, Minotaur, jeu-de-lettres, pigs-in-clover, frets and meanders.”

By 1983, Larry’s fascination with mazes has become an ambition to build one. He spends his spare time devising a maze that takes up the whole of the front and back yards of his house. His relationship with mazes has continued to deepen, offering him meaningful glimpses of profundity in his life: "the whole thing about mazes is that they make perfect sense only when you look down on them from above." However, Dorrie is frustrated by Larry’s new hobby. She asks a building contractor to bulldoze the front-yard section of the maze. Larry is distraught, and the event ultimately causes the couple to divorce.



We catch up with Larry next in 1986. He has a new wife, an academic named Beth Prior whose specialty is women saints. Larry is happy with Beth, but he recognizes that he cannot compare his feeling for her to the love he felt for Dorrie. Larry learns that his father has been diagnosed with colon cancer.

By 1988, Larry has become a success. Now living in Chicago, he is one of the world’s only professional maze-designers. He enjoys recognition and modest wealth, but he still finds himself thinking of Dorrie and his old home in Winnipeg. Dorrie has kept alive the section of the maze that survived the bulldozing.

Success also makes Larry anxious. He worries that he is a fraud, not good enough for the world he moves in now: “He has no university degree to fall back on or boast about, he has never read Charles Dickens or Ralph Waldo Emerson, he'd be more than half stumped if asked to locate the state of Nebraska on a map.”



We learn that Larry’s father has died of his cancer.

In 1991, Ryan comes to visit his father in Chicago. Larry is impressed by the twelve-year-old boy: he’s smart, artistically talented, and speaks fluent French. However, father and son haven’t seen much of each other and their relationship is stilted.

Beth publishes her first book in 1992. The couple’s relationship begins to fall apart. In 1994, the marriage ends, when Beth moves to England to take up an academic position. Larry wins the State of Illinois award for creative excellence.



In 1996, Larry collapses. He falls into a coma and remains comatose for nearly a month. Beth does not visit. Dorrie does, however, bringing Ryan, as does Larry’s new girlfriend, Charlotte Angus. Larry’s illness makes him confront the meaning of his life with more urgency: “He lives in the short view, his close-up, textured, parochial world, the little valley of intimacy he was born into, always thinking, without knowing he's thinking.”

The last chapter of the novel, “Larry’s Party,” takes place in 1997. Charlotte persuades Larry—now living in Toronto—to throw a dinner party, celebrating the coincidence that both Beth and Dorrie are in town. Larry is reluctant, but he agrees, inviting his sister and her husband, a wealthy client and his wife, and a colleague from Spain to make up the numbers. Over lamb and lima beans, the party discusses “what it’s like to be a man in 1997.”

Suddenly Larry realizes he is waiting for something to happen—but he doesn’t know what. He feels that he is “a man with a few loose parts: a brain, for instance, with a hinge he can flip open.” He has a vision of an alternate reality, in which he and Dorrie never divorced.



Dorrie stays behind after the party to help Larry tidy up, while Charlotte seems to have taken off with one of the guests. The novel ends as Larry and Dorrie—although the speakers are not identified in the dialogue—admit that they have always loved one another.