setUoYouRPROFILE's blog: "tufui"

When it comes right down to it,juicy couture most fiction writers are thieves. Sure, they cover themselves by prefacing their published work with that stock phrase about events and characters being fictitious. But they often draw on others’ real experiences in their stories, albeit just as a starting point for their own imaginings. One such act of literary larceny is at the heart of The Antagonist, Lynn Coady’s fourth novel. There has always been a lively, down-to-earth vigour to Coady’s prose and to her protagonists, who aren’t exactly hosers but are far from metrosexuals. (Credit her East Coast roots; she grew up on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Edmonton.) Gordon Rankin, the main character of The Antagonist, is probably her most compelling creation to date — which is also to say, the most intensely conflicted. The narrative takes the form of emails written by Gordon, now nearing 40, and a teacher in an unspecified small town. He has discovered that a trusted pal from his university days, 20 years earlier, has written a novel based on Gordon’s youthful transgressions, presenting him as a “seriously messed up dude” with criminal tendencies. As the outraged Gordon puts it, addressing his betrayer, “You boiled an entire life, an entire human being . . . down into his most basic, boneheaded elements.” He’s particularly incensed because Adam failed to take into account a crucial bit of biographical information. Gordon’s mother, Sylvie, died when he was just 16; in retrospect, Gordon blames much of his outrageous behaviour at university on grief. Adam mentions the death of his character’s mother, but only glancingly: “It did nothing, it was just a thing that had happened to the guy — his mom died, by the way.” Coady’s previous novel, Mean Boy, featured a wannabe poet and a party-hearty jock as college roommates and best buddies. Gordon’s and Adam’s freshmen friendship in The Antagonist follows similar lines. Adam is a self-contained, artsy geek. Gordon, looking back, acknowledges his youthful self as an obnoxious, drunken lout (his nickname was “Rank”). He first meets Adam and his friends, Kyle and Wade, following a party in which Rank chugs from a barrel of spiked punch, vomits into the barrel and continues to drink. The story tracks back and forth in time, but mainly focuses on Rank’s years as a teen and university student, and what the mature Gordon calls “a kind of grocery list of shame.” (He’s so uncomfortable with aspects of his past that at times he distances himself, shifting from “I” to the third person in recounting events.) All his life Rank has been huge, and his intimidating size leads those around him to make assumptions, starting with his family. His father, Gord Senior, is an irascible shrimp who takes vicarious pleasure in the fact that Gordon (who’s adopted) is a hulk. Gordon is just 15 when he starts working for his father’s Dairy Queen knock-off, Icy Dreams, where he’s tasked with chasing off undesirables. The local punk and drug dealer, in an act of deliberate provocation, decides to do business out of the parking lot, and Gord Sr. takes exception. When Rank intervenes, he ends up seriously injuring his adversary and facing criminal charges. It is the first time he “set foot into the grown-up world of consequences — the innocent ‘before’ juxtaposed against the catastrophic ‘after.’ ” The incidents, and the gravity of their consequences, multiply as the troubled Rank hits his late teens. An avid hockey player, he inadvertently knocks an opponent out of the game. While at university, he becomes a bouncer at a squalid bar (the ironically named Goldfinger’s) and graduates to the role of muscle for the drug-dealing bar owner. All the while, he and his university mates are majoring (it seems) in carousing, smoking weed and hanging out. A big part of the friends’ camaraderie, which Coady captures in crisp, perceptive detail and dialogue, is built around crudeness, bluster and awkwardness at handling emotional vulnerability. (The only time that Rank can level with his buddies about his feelings is when he’s drunk.) She’s equally astute at depicting the prickly family dynamics between the two Gordons. Gordon Sr. is a short-tempered know-it-all, given to foolish pronouncements that drive his son crazy. But the father is also genuinely proud of Rank — who is so tormented by shame that he can’t stomach his father’s admiration. In presenting Gordon’s version of events, Coady also subtly explores the way that writers use real events and people in their fiction. At the beginning of the book, Gordon is furious: “You have taken something that was mine and made it yours. Without even asking.” But over the course of The Antagonist, he begins to see Adam’s use of his story differently. Gordon comes to realize that Adam’s book is, in essence, not really about him, and that even his own attempt to tell “the truth” gets twisted: “Suddenly people in the story are doing and saying things you never meant for them to do or say — and you’re letting it happen because it’s fun. It’s interesting . . . You let the story take you instead of you taking it in the direction you originally mapped out.” Nevertheless, responding to Adam’s simplified depiction of a “seriously messed up dude” forces Gordon to come to terms with what has been haunting him for many years. In the revelatory climax of the narrative, we come to fully understand why he’s so tormented. At one point, Gordon refers to the protagonist in Adam’s book as a kind of Frankenstein monster. But Rank himself — even at his most volatile and brutish — isn’t monstrous. Credit Coady for making an empathetic character out of a “big-mouthed bruiser” who throws his weight around and has a penchant for gross-out stunts. A deft blend of farce, tragedy and wry social comment, The Antagonist is no mean feat.