Fridays With Carol Shields: Larry’s Party
I know this is dorky, but here’s a picture of Larry’s Party by Carol Shields near flowers – that I need to actually put in containers – on our porch. See, Larry Weller, the protagonist of Shields’ follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning The Stone Diaries, is an award-winning designer of garden mazes. But he stumbled upon this passion somewhat randomly. As a mediocre high school student, Larry decided that, hey, he’s gotta do something, so he might as well enroll at Red River College, where he inadvertently gets placed in its Floral Arts course. A job at chain store Flowerfolks follows – and a seed is planted. (Yes, that was a really terrible pun, but I didn’t even mean it!)
Although I have yet to read Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, this title/phrase continually popped into my head as I read this book – Shields’ successful attempt at “writing a man.” Shields so eloquently describes Larry’s constantly unfolding awareness that there’s a bigger world for him to partake in. Whereas Shields’ female characters are often wondering what “more” is out there for them (i.e. “can I be more than the tasks set out on my personal and professional to-do lists?”), the way she writes Larry is somewhat different. Readers first meet Larry when there is a mix-up of tweed jackets at a coffee shop; the one Larry accidentally grabs is “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.” As he strolls through the city to meet his wife, he thinks about “how great [he feels] in this other guy’s Harris tweed jacket.”
And thus we witness Larry’s “becoming”; his sense that life isn’t static and that he might be able to partake in some of its extraordinary qualities. But how? I’d venture to guess that men aren’t given to the same language that women use for this process, and this is what Shields addresses through her typically wonderful storytelling. #FridaysWithCarolShields
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