STRONG ROOTS

By Paul Gray

In her first novel since the Pulitzer-prizewinning The Stone Diaries (1995), Carol Shields takes on the burden of eliciting interest in a rather unprepossessing hero. Larry's Party (Viking; 339 pages; $23.95) offers 15 chapters, each of which has the stand-alone feel of a short story, excerpting details from the imagined life of one Larry Weller.

There he is at 26, in 1977, a floral designer in Winnipeg, Canada, living with his parents and happy in his job. Then he marries Dorrie and buys a house. They have a son they name Ryan, but their marriage breaks up after five years. Unexpectedly, Larry becomes prominent and well paid for designing and planting hedge mazes, an interest he developed during his honeymoon in England with Dorrie. He meets and marries Beth, an aspiring academic who later leaves him and their marriage for a prestigious post in London. In 1996, Larry falls into a coma for 22 days but recovers fully. A year later, he and his girlfriend Charlotte give a party to which, a tad improbably, both of Larry's ex-wives wind up being invited.

Save, perhaps, for the title character's coma, Larry's Party would seem to offer readers an experience about as exciting as watching shrubs grow. But Shields demonstrates that doing just that can be fascinating if seen through the speeded-up, time-lapse frames of her narrative. Larry develops from "a dreamy kid" into a grown man who feels that "he's been dozing off again." Life has pruned him for good and ill but not altered his essential stock. His passive nature, his curiosity about what will happen to him next, does not form the raw material for high drama. But in him, Shields captures an unremarkable man in a remarkable light.

--By Paul Gray