After these ones I’m all caught up! Hoorah!
These two books I wanted to save and do together. For one thing I’ve just finished them so I’ve got plenty to say, and for another, they’re an interesting contrast.
#18: Larry’s Party by Carol Shields
#19: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Carol Shields is the Pulitzer winning author of the Stone Diaries, a book I have not read, and Anne Tyler is the Pulitzer winning author of Breathing Lessons, another book I have not read, but is also the author of many many other books I have read that were a joy to read. It’s so nice when a great book that is also an entertaining book is recognized as being literature despite commercial success. In her book Moo, Jane Smiley hypothesized the measure of commercial success of an author as being directly opposed to the author’s critical success. And that explains why so many Nobel laureates are people that I’ve never seen on the bookshelves until after they win the prize.
Anyway.
Unintentionally, I read these two books right after one another (Shields and Tyler are close together on the bookshelf and I’m trying to finish reading everything there), and they share the fact that they are both novels written by women who feature men as the protagonist. I enjoyed Tyler’s work much better, partly because it had a real plot. In her novel, a repressed man who recently lost his son goes through a divorce, meets a free spirit and is liberated. It’s been done so so many times since this book came out that it’s hard to remember that at one point this plot was unique. So unique in fact that in the movie version GEENA DAVIS won an OSCAR for playing the free spirit. OK? If that doesn’t say a well written part than nothing will.
Shield’s version was one man’s life story. Told badly. A man marries young, becomes passionately obsessed with hedge mazes, gets divorced, gets married again, becomes a big success in the world of hedge mazes, gets divorced again, starts dating someone else, and throws a big dinner party for all the women in his life. The book also has a peculiar quirk of retelling the same events over and over again in exactly the same way. To my thinking, this was symbolic of the hedge maze and doubling back on a false path, but it bored me TO TEARS! It would have been an interesting conceit if she told the different story from a slightly different perspective, or with slightly more information, but hearing about his career at the flower shop in exactly the same way four different times? Snoozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzze.
Tyler also succeeds in how she portrays her protagonist. Both books are written in a not quite omniscient 3rd person, but Macon Leary is fully realized while I don’t know Larry Weller from Shield’s book at all. We learn so much about Macon through his interactions with his family, through his repressed actions, through the way he conducts his business and how he treats his dog. Larry seems to go through life without anything impacting him at all. The whole time I was reading Larry’s Party I wanted to call Shields up and tell her that writing about how a man spends his day does not necessarily tell us all we need to know about a character. Today I knitted a blanket and mopped the floor. Do you know all about me now?
The capper in my hatred for Larry’s Party was the final scene. All of a sudden the book is about male/female relations, when that was never brought up before. And I actively disagreed with much of what the women in Larry’s life proposed women to be. I wanted to throw the book across the room.
In short: Larry’s Party? sucks.
The Accidental Tourist? reliably good.
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