October 26, 2011
The Submission by Amy Waldman
Amy Waldman’s The Submission begins with a jury making their final deliberations on how site of the September 11th terrorist attacks are to memorialized. Two years on from that fateful day, the nation is still raw, and anxious for healing to begin. No juror feels this more acutely than Claire Burwell, who lost her husband in the attacks, and who has been selected to serve representing the interests of the victim’s families. She rallies support around a design called The Garden, where she can imagine her children playing and which serves to honour the kind of man her husband was, as opposed to the more brutalist designs championed by other jury members. The Garden wins, the identity of its designer revealed, and he turns out to be a man called Mohammed Khan.
That the outrage sparked by this revelation seemed implausible to me mostly means that I don’t live properly in the world. A world in which the idea of a Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero) sends people to the streets spouting hatred and threats of violence, which no doubt inspired some of what transpires in The Submission. The story shifts from Claire Burwell to Mohammed Khan himself, an architect American born-and-raised who is stunned to find himself in the spotlight, discussed on late night TV by right-wing windbags who speculate upon his motivations and foster rumours that this secular Muslim has extremist ties.
The story moves back and forth between these two characters and others, including a reporter who sees the story as an opportunity to further her own career, a Bangladeshi illegal alien who also lost her husband in the towers, the brother of a deceased firefighter who sees his newfound 9/11 status as a chance to finally make something of his life, the jury chair who’s caught between the jury and a state governor with elections on her mind.
Waldman is the former co-chief of the New York Times’ South Asia Bureau, and has the journalistic chops to tackle a story with such breadth, and also understands the spiral effect of story and the role the media plays in this process. It was on the side of fiction, however, where the story fell down for me, and in characterization more specifically. Claire Burwell herself is little more than a type, and she loses substance as the story progresses. Her supposed downfall is an ability to see the issue from all sides, but I failed to see her at all. Waldman tries to complicate her character by suggesting that all was not as well in her marriage as she presents to the outside world, but this significant storyline is never picked up again, and Claire herself ends up virtually disappearing from the novel about two thirds of the way through.
Another character weakly drawn was the firefighter’s brother, who turns out to have stupidity and alcoholism underlining his vitriol. It would have been more interesting to find a bigoted jingoist as intelligent and sure of himself as the characters on the other side. And not for the sake of fairness and balance, but rather because I think we’d be fooling ourselves if we explained away all the idiots as people who know they’re idiots deep down. In reality, there is a fiercer opposition to contend with.
But The Submission turns out to be a better book than it seems, and it turns out that what Waldman is writing about is not opposition at all. Khan digs in his heels and refuses to submit to the demands being put upon him from all sides– does he deny his background, assert himself as an American? But what of his understanding that being American means one has no need to deny his background? But who is he serving here? His country? His some-time faith? Himself? Claire Burwell is asking herself similar questions in her role as juror, and doubt is cast in her mind as to Khan’s intentions. Doubt he refuses to assuage because he’s never given her reason to mistrust him, so he holds back on principle, her mistrust doubly undermined. They’re turning in circles, and so is the whole world around them, violence and intensity escalating with each revolution, which culminates in a life that is tragically lost.
Waldman’s language doesn’t call attention to itself, though hers is a working prose that is doing things, so you’ll notice when you take your mind off the plot enough to pay attention. And similarly with the literary-ness of the novel, which creeps in and eventually outshines the plot. In the end, The Submission is a story both more universal and more specific than what the plot suggests, challenging, provocative and rich.
October 19, 2011
Once You Break a Knuckle by D.W. Wilson
On Monday, I compared D.W. Wilson to Alice Munro in a Twitter post, and got called out by a few people for being off the mark. Upon rereading my post, I could see how it my point was misconstrued– I forgot that Alice Munro comparisons must necessarily denote Greatness, and I didn’t mean to do that. D.W. Wilson’s short story collection Once You Break a Knuckle reads very much like a first book, lacking in precision and assurance, but there is promise here, evidence of a good writer whose best work is still before him. Which really, in a first book, sometimes, is all that a reader can ask for.
But I stand by my Munro comparison, though I know I should be comparing Wilson to Raymond Carver and commenting on the raw, violent masculinity afoot. What I couldn’t stop thinking of, however, as I read the stories about Will Crease sparring with police constable father John was Flo & Rose, and the Royal Beatings,that violent dynamic of family life with love at its root. About class and how both families are of and apart from their communities, and about the communities themselves, Wilson’ s real-life town of Invermere evoked similarly to Munro’s Hanratty (or Jubilee). And how Wilson seems preoccupied with certain ideas, characters and story lines, returning to them again and again to examine them from various angles, as Munro has also done throughout her story collections and throughout her entire career.
I agree with Steven Beattie’s comment that the Will Crease stories in this book have the feel of ” chapters in a novel searching for a through-line”. My favourite story in the collection was a Will Crease story, but the one that seemed most discrete from the rest, “Don’t Touch The Ground,” about a young person’s act of vengeance with tragic consequences. The collection’s longest story “Valley Echo” was also strong, and its structure reminded me of Munro’s ability to telescope time.
There is a class division throughout the collection between “the hicks” so feared by Will and his friends, and the down-and-outs themselves– I found myself longing for a connection as in a story like Alexander MacLeod’s “Light Lifting”, which would have shed considerable light on both sides. Though there were other kinds of links, most particularly the Oldsmobile 1955 Rocket 88, which turns up with a few different drivers at its wheel, recurring characters, and repeated expressions about broken knuckles and picking fights, and kicking cows as well.
I got hung up on some of the metaphors– no matter how many times I read the line, “I’ve got fibrous red hair and a jaw tapered like a rugby ball,” I still can’t see what he’s saying. Then there was the line about “wineglass-sized breasts”, and I just don’t really think people should compare breasts to anything. But I underlined good parts too– my favourite passage was, “And she was attracted to him– if he didn’t, for instance, need someone to pull his head from the clouds– then Ray knew why: broken people are drawn to broken people. That’s the love life he had to look forward to with Kelly: a three-legged race.”
There is a bleakness to these stories, a sense of inevitability that Wilson goes to such pains to make clear that he takes us decades into the future, and the future is a lot like now is. In a town like Invermere, nothing ever changes, but Wilson that shows story happens all the same.
October 16, 2011
Not Being on a Boat by Esme Claire Keith
There was so much right about Esme Claire Keith’s novel Not Being on a Boat that I was planning to review it here anyway, even though there was one thing quite wrong. The one thing being its length, of course, and that being trapped in the mind of her Mr. Rutledge for 350 pages was just too much, but that it was so thoroughly too much was because her Mr. Rutledge was so spotlessly executed. A divorced retiree jacked up on the force of his own consumer power, he has bid farewell to the world and boarded the good ship Mariola to sail off into the sunset. Equipped with two tuxedos and a taste for the finer things in life, he’s expecting good value for his money and some fine conversation with the other passengers in the Captain’s Mess.
The devil is in the details, however, all of which Rutledge notices, astute businessman (and borderline autistic) that he is, forever on the lookout for number one. But such details and this perspective doesn’t make for great reading, not 350 pages of it, as we learn about the ship’s laundry procedures, and what’s available on the menu, and the historical facts even Rutledge fast tires of as delivered by guides giving tours at the ship’s ports of call. The flawlessness of Keith’s narrative makes reading really hard-going, though things outside Rutledge’s head are certainly interesting: we receive glimpses of the distopian civilization that Rutledge has left behind him, and the problems come aboard the Mariola when one day a group of passengers and some crew fail to return from a port of call. Suddenly, the ship’s standards begin slipping, supplies are getting low, communications are shut down from the outside world, and the problems of the outside world are creeping in through the portholes.
The novel concludes with an end-of-days scenario that had me furious: 350 pages for this? But as the fury wore off, I decided to write about the book anyway because Keith’s control of her project was so impeccable, and also because I’m not sure there was any other way she could have ended it. Not Being on a Boat is a marvelous satire of consumer culture and luxury tourism, so smart and funny, deadpan and sharp. (It is also beautifully designed by kisscut book design, including the map of the boat I discovered under the back flap). And sometimes a flawed book really can still portend the debut of a really great writer, so though “less is more” would really go a long way here, I’d say Keith is one to keep an eye on, and I’d check out what she comes up with next.
October 12, 2011
The Big Dream by Rebecca Rosenblum
Though I am far too close to Rebeccca Rosenblum to be able to give an unbiased assessment of her new short story collection The Big Dream, I’m going to let my bias fly and tell you that this is a wonderful book. A collection of linked stories about employees at the struggling publishing company Dream Inc., The Big Dream begins with tech support staff scurrying underfoot like rodents and then moves up the corporate food chain– call centre staff anticipating lay-offs, a cafeteria worker who can’t get it together, a new-hire who casts the jadedness of the design staff in terrible perspective, the retired CEO who can’t accept that it’s over, a lusty encounter between the CFO and Senior Marketing Manager, tension between the top execs, and the final story, “This Weather I’m Under” about a VP charged with firing an entire department as her mother lays dying in the hospital.
The entire collection reminded me of a line from Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything: “It’s funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy.” Though there’s not a lot of enjoyment going on in The Big Dream, but certainly, Rosenblum shows that our lives are what we bring to work every day. It’s the personal calls we take at our desks, the way decorate our cubes, what’s in our lunch bags, and hidden in our drawers, and in our coats, and tights, shoes that pinch, and our dental emergencies too. It’s in the camaraderie between office-mates, the shared language, inside jokes, and institutions.
Me interviewing Rebecca at her book launch last month.
My favourite story is “Research”, a story of libreation about a woman who shows up to work one day to discover her entire department has been laid-off and is suddenly left to her own devices. She devotes her research to discovering her office building– its incredibly topography (which is always changing– cubes go up, cubes come down), and the floors above and below her own that she’s never seen before– the modern office has never been seen through such eyes before, and with such reverence. I love the sex scenes in “Loneliness”, which are so perfect. I’m uncomfortable with the Russian boy who masturbates into a sock in “Complimentary Yoga”, but only because I’m a prude, and I’m amazed by how thoroughly he’s been created. “How to Keep Your Day Job” is a wonderful story in second person, the exhausting tale of a fall down a flight of stairs. I love the ending of “After the Meeting”, in which a group of co-workers assemble after their entire department has been dismissed, and they have to consider what they really have in common anymore. I know the predicament of the tech support guy with an abscessed tooth who dreams of dental coverage and is even entitled to it, except that he’s not been given his three-month review and the company really has no intention of making him permanent staff.
The backdrop is bleak, but the conversation is funny. In this fascinating look at the cogs that really run the corporate machine, Rebecca has written a book that’s even better than her much-praised first collection Once. A must to check out for any cubicle dweller, and also for any reader who likes to marvel at the amazing things the short story can do.
October 5, 2011
Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt
Tessa McWatt writes the strangest novels. I’d read Step Closer in 2009, and found it utterly puzzling; not perfect, but so unlike anything else I was reading at the time that it struck a chord and stayed with me, the way she experimented with narrative and form to challenge the limits of fiction and story. Her latest novel Vital Signs is just as odd, and just as much a puzzle. It begins with a husband whose wife is wearing an electrode cap, having her brain scanned, and it dawns on him that he is not worthy of her. And we are to take from this that the idea has never occurred to him before the novel’s first sentence, that in all the years underlying this novel’s relatively brief time span, that he’d never considered this dynamic. But it’s hard to take him at his word, because he’s a narrator who doesn’t even know his own story, let alone his own self.
Michael is the kind of husband who’s always loved his wife best at a kind of distance. (I’d mentioned that McWatt’s previous book reminded me of Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife. It ain’t got nothing on how this one does.) He’s attracted by the darkness of her skin when he first meets her, and waits for weeks to discover where she actually comes from, because he prefers the allure of mystery. An allure that is all but extinguished when his exotic wife is transferred to a domestic setting, and sets to work keeping his house and rearing his children. Michael’s disappointment is only added to when his design career doesn’t take off as he expected, and though he does well enough, so many dreams remain unrealized. His desperation for more finds an outlet in a cliched affair with a young colleague, which ends after too many years of her wanting more than he can give.
When Michael’s wife Anna is diagnosed with an aneurysm, the history of his marriage becomes stirred up in the present. He knows there is a chance his wife could die, and he is anxious to confess his sins to her. But this is complicated by Anna’s medical problems, which have left her with a mangled, near-indecipherable way of communicating. The words themselves are clear, but put together, they are nonsense, or else they are stories of things she believes are true that have actually never happened.
And yet, Michael feels there is secret meaning to what she says, that she knows more than she lets on. He begins to find himself communicating with her better than he has in years, and he uses his own skills in designing pictograms to tell her things he’s never been able to put into words. The reader finds, however, that he’s really just slipping into the same old patterns, lusting after his wife when she is away from him, exoticizing her character. He imagines the dressings that will be wrapped around her head after brain surgery: “[the nurse] will wrap it once, twice, more times around Anna’s head, and my wife will resemble an Egyptian nomad.”
Puzzles aside (and there are plenty. McWatt is attempting to answer the question, “What is a mind?” after all. The novel contains actual representations of Michael’s pictograms, and I confess to poring over the novel’s ending and still not really understanding what happened. Though perhaps this is the point– that Anna gets it, and this is all that matters), this is a novel about marriage and family. A decidedly bleak novel about marriage and family, and Michael’s ambivalence toward his wife and children pointedly demonstrates the desperate underside of love.
October 2, 2011
Outside the Box by Maria Meindl
My friend Maria Meindl has written one of the best books I’ve read this year in Outside the Box: The Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, The Grandmother I Thought I Knew, and it’s a book that proves fascinating on all different kinds of levels. First, Meindl’s book is a history of magazines and radio broadcasting in Canada during the mid-2oth century, demonstrated by the experiences of Mona Gould who made her entire career as a freelancer in poetry, copy-writing, feature-writing, radio broadcasting, and column-writing between the 1930s and the 1960s. She wrote for publications including Saturday Night and Chatelaine, worked as a publicist for the Red Cross during WWII, was affected by the split between commercial and literary writing that took place during the 1950s, published two books of poetry, and her most famous poem “That Was My Brother” in included in anthologies and textbooks to this day. In her radio broadcasts, she’d have to find subtle ways to work word of her program’s sponsor into her scripts. At times, Gould was published in the same periodicals as poets as notable as PK Page and Margaret Avison, but never achieved the same prominence herself, and from this failure to remarkably ascend, her story has a great deal more to tell about the wider world of publishing and broadcasting in her time than those of those whose experiences were so singular.
Which is not to say that Mona Gould was not remarkable or singular. At her best and worst, there was no one else quite like her, and Meindl has done a tremendous job of portraying such a complicated woman and the ambivalence involved in family relationships. Though she certainly had the resources at her disposal– Outside the Box is not just Mona’s story, but is also the story of Maria’s years-long efforts to catalogue Mona’s archives for the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto. Boxes upon boxes she’d inherited after her grandmother’s death, and she writes about how the boxes were conspicuous in the archives– everything slung into boxes willy-nilly, the boxes themselves tatted and from anywhere, and the papers within covered with dust and cat-hair, and she’d discover open tubs of vaseline, and on the back of one pile of of papers was stuck a colostomy bag. The boxes were a mess, and cataloguing them often appeared an impossible task. More burden than gift, as her grandmother had so often seemed to be to Maria. And yet there was richness to be found, and a Mona Gould to be discovered who was distinct from the alcoholic, mean-spirited woman she remembered as having come between her parents in their marriage. Letters written to lifelong friends, papers that demonstrated that Mona had worked hard for her success and it had not simply appeared to her, as she sometimes spun it. That this woman who put herself above feminism and craved approval from men had battled discrimination throughout her career. Maria had been aware that her grandmother had been something of a liar, but the truth behind these stories is often more fascinating than she’d ever imagined.
The book also has much to say to a society so fixated on the cult of personality, celebrity, which Meindl shows is not an altogether modern phenomenon. It is likely that Mona Gould worked as hard on cultivating her “brand” as she did her writing (though, obviously, she would not have put it that way), craving attention and admiration, and in the end, she’d prove a victim of society’s fickleness, and to the changingness of fashion.
Ultimately, however, Outside the Box is a story of inheritance, of coming to terms with where we’ve come from and who we are. In exquisite prose and with a fascinating mastery of chronology, Meindl makes this her own story as much as Mona’s, the story of how becoming settled in her own life and happiness required her to make peace with her family’s past, to unpack the metaphoric baggage that was as heavy as all those boxes and boxes her grandmother had left her.
September 27, 2011
Suitable Precautions by Laura Boudreau
There was a period in which Laura Boudreau and I were both enrolled in the same creative writing program at UofT, though due to me being a hermit, we never met up that often. So I must say that I know the stories of Laura Boudreau considerably better than I know Laura Boudreau herself– I remember reading “Strange Pilgrims” in The New Quarterly, the strange sad story of love with a mailman, and there was her Journey Prize-nominated story “The Dead Dad Game”, which I described as “a young person’s perspective on a broken world, and that world is realized with such humour, poignancy and quirky charm.”
So I thought I knew what to expect with Boudreau’s first book, the story collection Suitable Precautions, but it seems that Laura Boudreau writes to thwart expectations. Which I discovered when I read her book whose stories refused to be pinned down and be any one thing. Yes, we have “The Dead Dad Game”, which is just as good upon rereading, just your standard tale of two half-siblings lying on their father’s grave seeking out good vibrations (as the urging of the siblings’ one surviving parent), after which the creepy neighbour’s pot-bellied pig is maimed in a collision so that the siblings have to create apologetic chalk drawings.
For the first time here, I read her story “The Vosmak Geneology”, about the daughter of the daughter of alleged immigrants, whose mother becomes brain injured by a falling picnic table, loses the capacity for abstract thought or imaginings, then eventually creates a phenomenally popular series of children’s books, factually based upon the life of our narrator who spends her time doing homework in the window of a gypsy’s. “The Meteorite Hunter” about a divorced father who doesn’t quite rue his sorry past, but certainly ruminates upon it as he drives with his stranger daughter to visit a man who’s reported to be able to detect meteorites where they fall (and of course, what father and daughter find that their destination is not what they’d expected).
So what I mean by this is that Laura Boudreau’s stories are not “about” just any one thing, but rather they’re about story, about narrative, about the way a writer starts in one place and ends up in another. I mean, speaking of destinations not expected, that none of these stories will take you where you think you’re on your way to, that these are wild sprawling narratives, and yet Boudreau’s writing is so absolutely controlled. There is a tightness, a deliberateness to the way that she makes the jump from even once sentence to another a determined leap like, “I remember seeing a man in a paper gown masturbating in the hallway. We stayed for lunch.”
In terms of tightness, deliberateness, there is nothing else like Boudreau’s command of the first person voice, however. She does young people so well, in “The Dead Dad Game”, and also in “Poses”, which manages to be a story about a young girl posing for an internet pornographer but also be hilarious. I think my favourite story of the collection is “The D&D Report”, which is another of Boudreau’s stories that start somewhere and end up somewhere else, and manages to have years pass effortlessly as its narrator goes from slacker-lifeguard with a yearning for med. school to a doctor with a husband whose whole life is built on uncertain foundations.
Suitable Precautions is a curious book, the kind of book I had to talk about with somebody else as I read it, because there was so much to say. It’s the kind of collection that might appeal to another short story writer, Carolyn Black, who remarked in her interview with me, “For me, now, writing that explains everything requires a good deal of patience, if only because I’ve read so much of it; writing that resists explication seems beautiful and true.”
September 27, 2011
Mini Review: Come Up and See Me Sometime by Erika Krouse
I feel a bit sorry for any book that was published in 2001– that day in September, scores of brand new books would have been made dated immediately, becoming relics of a different time. Perhaps this is part of the reason that Erika Krouse hasn’t published another book since her debut collection Come Up and See Me Sometime, which I bought discarded from the library for a quarter (see? the story of this book was always going to be a tragedy). Her book came into the world when “chick lit” was not so ubiquitous, and still had the potential to be an interesting genre. Her book contained a story called “Too Big To Float” in which a pilot says to his girlfriend, “Go to Aruba with me. I’m flying there tomorrow. It’ll be free. You can sit in the cockpit and see how it’s all done.” A product of another time indeed.
Come Up and See Me Sometime is constructed on a gimmick– each of these stories is preceded by a quote from Mae West. Though I’m no Mae West devotee, the gimmick is superfluous to the stories’ appeal, and I bought this book because it’s about women who choose not to get married, who choose not to have children. It’s about women who make these choices but also don’t necessarily live like adolescents, and I found this approach intriguing. My own reading is drenched in stories of domesticity, and I wanted to broaden my literary horizons a bit.
One never expects to really enjoy a book that was got for a quarter, but it turned out that I received a very good deal. Krouse’s stories are darkly funny, edgy and wise. Impersonators contains the passage, “On Anna’s eighteenth birthday, one of her friends had given her edible underwear. She didn’t go on a single date for over a year. Anna said that eventually she got tired of waiting and ate them herself.” Which is sort of the story of my life.
In “My Weddings” (West quote: “I’m single because I was born that way), a character recounts the weddings she’s attended in her life, and ends with “relief and fear tangled together, like the hands of women clutching in the air for a falling bouquet of something.” In “No Universe”, a woman considers her choice not to have children, and finishes with the most stunning ending, baby with a crackpipe. Romance with an addict is dealt with in “Drugs and You”, in “Other People’s Mothers”, the protagonist gauges her relationship with her mother against the relationships she has had with mothers of friends and boyfriends, in “Impersonators”, a love triangle gone askew involves two office temps who are both so realized.
Come Up and See Me Sometime was a great read, so completely full of promise, and I’d love to know what Erika Krouse, if she’s come out of the cockpit, so to speak, and what her characters would make of this sad new world we’re in today.
September 19, 2011
Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein
The bad news about Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter is that she’s preaching to the choir here. My husband and I both read this book, and came away more than ever firmly entrenched that girlie/princess culture is bad news for little girls. And not just because of the limited nature of the princess narrative and her identity, but because underneath it lies the trap of rampant consumerism. The great news, however, is that we can’t afford to join that culture anyway, which also comes with its own parenting challenges, but will make so many other things easier.
Orenstein does a great job of showing that “princess culture” is such a recent phenomenon, and that signing up is just to play into corporate hands (and to get those hands into your pockets). That these companies are not simply giving consumers what they want, but are also intentionally coercing children into wanting consumer products that are expensive, and detrimental to the development of their self-image. She shows that companies are out to make a buck by gendering children’s toys (thereby ensuring that parents will have to buy two of everything), and also by inventing stages from toddler to tween to “pre-tween” so that nothing ever lasts more than a season.
Orenstein’s writing is funny, engaging, and self-deprecating as she draws on her own experiences as a mother negotiating the labyrinth of princess-dom. She doesn’t take cheap shots, most notably in her chapter on the child beauty pageant circuits. Many of her subjects are really easy targets, but Orenstein writes about them with sympathy, and also shows how their preposterousness is only a magnified version of most parents’ experiences with princess consumer culture, echoing those same old excuses: “But we’re only giving her what she wants” and “It’s doing no harm.” From reading this book, it becomes decidedly clear that neither of these statements are true.
Anyway, what’s strangest to me is that the choir Orenstein is preaching to isn’t all that big. I guess if it was, we’d all have nothing much to sing about. For me, one of the biggest surprises of parenthood all along has been that common sense is such a relative thing. It reminds me of when writer Carrie Snyder wrote about no-gift birthday parties in her parenting column (an idea we’ve since stolen), and got the most cruel (anonymous) responses, similar to those received by Orenstein herself when, as she writes, she first dared to suggest that princess-dom might not be doing our daughters a lot of good. Both mothers were accused of deprivation, which is not so unbelievable, I guess, when you consider that so many people think shoe shopping is exercising our democratic freedom (not to mention, how to be a feminist). Anyway, I guess what I mean is that these are the people who should be reading this book, but they won’t be, and that’s depressing.
September 15, 2011
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
The jocks in my classes at university were always kind of fascinating. Mostly because one didn’t encounter them very often– I went to Uof T whose sports programs were notoriously poor-perfoming. But also because their academic skills always came as a kind of surprise, and because some of them were so big that they couldn’t fit into those chairs that had the desks attached, and had to sort of get wedged in, and I remember how completely uncomfortable these guys looked, how they rendered the world lilliputian, but somehow they were the freaks.
The jock, Rank, was only one of the many characters in Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist who I recognized so completely, who made me think, “I know these people.” Like Rank, I was also “born in a small town”, and so I recognized his father also, a guy called Gord who starts every sentence with, “That little fucker…” And the deadbeat, and his fat friend, and then the middle class versions of these guys who Rank encounters when he gets out of that small town and goes to university (and tries and fails to wedge himself into one of those impossible desks).
Or maybe what I mean is that Coady’s book had me realizing that I didn’t know any of these people at all, actually, and that my recognition of these type had no real connection with these characters’ inner workings, the circumstances of their lives. Coady has taken all kinds of familiar tropes here– foundling child grows up to be Paul Bunyan, to have the strength of Superman, local boy does bad and local boy does good, and local boy does everything he can to escape being created by a father who didn’t create him after all, or at least not biologically-speaking, and by the time Coady is through, these tropes are as unrecognizable as the types are, and here we’ve got a startlingly original novel with incredible depth and devourability.
Not that this is a novel without precedent. Coady’s last novel, 2006’s Mean Boy was a hilarious satire of university creative writing programs, and it had many of the same metafictional elements as The Antagonist (which is, in its own way, also a campus send-up). It even had an antecedent to protagonist/antagonist Rank, a big strapping drunk guy who’s prone to homicidal rages.
Rank is the whole story here, however, it’s his fingers at the keyboard tapping out a message to ghost from deep in his past. Or perhaps the ghost is himself, his younger self, who he’s just encountered in fictional form in a novel written by a former friend. A big strapping drunk guy who’s prone to homicidal rages, and Rank has recognized himself in his old friend’s story. Coady’s novel is Rank’s response to this recognition, a letter to the author to set the record straight.
Coady handles the structure (an email) so elegantly, with flourish (“Consider this the first chapter”), but eventually the structure fades away for the reader and the story runs the show. Rank (whose name is actually Gordon Rankin, Jr. He notes the moment of his uncomfortable awakening that he’s spent most of his life instructing people to call him “Stinky”) goes back to his childhood and adolescence to get to the root of his true story, the awkwardness of being a fifteen year old boy in a giant man’s body, and the expectations this body has foisted upon him. Which are mainly his father’s, that he’ll take care of any punks hanging around their family business, and with his outsized strength, this gets him into serious trouble.
Stories of a subsequent court case are woven around a later plot-line involving Rank and his friends at university (which he attends after achieving an unlikely hockey scholarship), and the inevitability of Rank once again conforming to type. The plot gestures toward this second story culminating in another act of violence, and there is also mystery surrounding what exactly happened to Rank’s mom, both of which make for compelling reading, even more-so because of the immediacy of Rank’s own voice, and the urgency of his message as he types the story home. He’s incredibly likable, but he’s terrifying, and there are these moments at which he undermines himself, and others where the story does it for him. He’s also a narcissist who can’t bear to look in the mirror, so convincingly embodying all of these contradictions, and the result is one of the most fascinating fictional creations I’ve encountered in a very long time.
And what’s even more fascinating, of course, is that he’s his own creation here, competing with someone else’s version of him, which opens up all kinds of questions about story and character, and the execution of both in real life. Embodying even more contradictions: Rank writes, “Even now, speaking to me from twenty years ago, you had me pegged./ Which makes no sense when I think about your book. How could it you could have me so nailed down and still get everything wrong?”
Lynn Coady has arrived with this amazing novel which combines its depth with broad appeal, and her trademark humour is also on display to balance out the story’s heaviness. She also manages to finally bring together the various plotlines in such a satisfying way, though this didn’t mean, of course, that I was any less devastated to have to stop reading because the story was over. (I was. I was. This is a novel that casts a spell.)
