TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 9/02/97: Burning The Days: Recollection James Salter Nonfiction 8/22/97: Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood Eileen Whitfield Nonfiction 8/21/97: Walt Whitman: A Gay Life Gary Schmidgall Nonfiction 8/20/97: Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge Hillary Johnson Nonfiction 8/19/97: Men Giving Money, Women Yelling Alice Mattison Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: The Tijuana Bibles By Susie Bright The "Tijuana Bibles," America's original X-rated underground comics, evoke a time when sex was dirty, innocent and handmade. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

larry's P A R T Y BY CAROL SHIELDS VIKING 306 PAGES FICTION BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK if you ever needed proof that the road to reading hell is paved with beautifully wrought prose, Carol Shields' sometimes exquisitely written, mostly excruciatingly dull "Larry's Party" is it. Shields, who won the Pulitzer in 1995 for "The Stone Diaries," knows how to write sentences with cheekbones all right. Here the protagonist reflects on a childhood memory, of hearing his parents' nighttime conversations in the next room: "First his mother, then his father, back and forth like a kind of weaving. There would be a pause, and then the murmurous resonance resumed. He would fall asleep, finally, to the rhythm of those strange voices: Stu and Dot Weller, his silent parents, coming awake in the soundwaves of their own muffled words, made graceful by what they chose to say in the long darkness." But once you've had your fill of china-figurine prose styling like that -- and if you maintain your enthusiasm through more than 20 pages, you've got me beat -- you might find yourself asking, "Where did Shields mislay the story?" It's in there somewhere, partially obscured by all the showily sensitive writing, something about a nice fellow named Larry Weller, who slips thoughtlessly into a first marriage (after getting his girlfriend pregnant), drifts into a divorce and later marries an annoying academic who ultimately leaves him. The novel covers 20 years in the life of this regular guy, with individual chapters representing different segments of his existence, each set up as a discrete, self-contained unit. Sample chapter titles are "Larry's Love," "Larry's Kid" and, my personal favorite, "Larry's Penis." (Trust me, it's got nothing on "I Am Joe's Esophagus" from the April 23, 1967, Readers' Digest.) Shields has taken great pains to give Larry an "interesting" calling, something that gives him "depth": He starts his career as a mild-mannered floral designer (having earned, she reminds us repeatedly, a "Floral Arts Diploma" from "Red River College" in his hometown of Winnipeg) and somehow transforms himself into a successful landscape architect. His specialty is elaborate mazes, and here's what he likes about them: "It's really when entering a previously unknown maze, especially a hedge maze, that Larry is brought to a condition which he thinks of as spiritual excitement. The maze's preordained design, its complications, which are at once unsettling and serene, the shifts of light and shade, the pulsing vegetal growth which is encouraged but also held in check -- all this ignites Larry's sense of equilibrium and sends him soaring." Fly free, little Larry! And be sure to keep that equilibrium of yours away from open flame. And about your party? I send my regrets. Something else suddenly came up. Sept. 3, 1997 Stephanie Zacharek lives in Boston. She is a regular contributor to Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html