LARRY'S PARTY

Pulitzer winner Shields spins the saga of an ordinary guy during thirty ordinary years, with neither the guy nor the times proving so ordinary. It's kind of Jude the Obscure for Boomers--at least that's how it seems as interpreted by narrator Bresnahan. She adopts an unhurried tone of fatalistic melancholy over-punctuated with pregnant pauses. Each sentence, each phrase she treats as a pearl of significance. And there are a heck of a lot of phrases in this tome. The exercise would soon pall were it not for her pleasant, contemporary sound and sensitivity to textual nuances. Larry and his gift for designing garden mazes grow on one. Slowly. Very slowly. Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 98]