Book Review: Mean Boy by Lynn Coady - Page 2

The third risk is Coady's decision to write an unabashedly Canadian novel. Even the title is unabashedly Canadian — an allusion to a poem by Milton Acorn who, like the novel's narrator, was born on Prince Edward Island. But it has been a long-standing tradition among Canadian writers to be deliberately vague about setting and place names. Perhaps this tradition was dictated by economic necessity — if you wanted to sell books, then you had to appeal to a British or to an American audience. I remember how I smirked when I first read the title of Hugh Garner's detective novel, Death in Don Mills. Don Mills is a rather dull suburb of Toronto, and to those of us who live nearby, it seems inconceivable that anything remotely interesting could happen in Don Mills. Why not be a good Canadian writer like Mavis Gallant and move to Paris? Why not be like Margaret Atwood and invent futuristic settings? Or be like Michael Ondaatje and write about Hungarian counts who dig excavations in the Sahara? What was Coady thinking when she decided to write about a teenager from Summerside, PEI who attends a small university in New Brunswick?

And yet, Coady's approach is wholly appropriate to one of the novel's principal themes: talent lurks in unexpected places. A person who is sophisticated, well-educated, and urbane may never have been blessed. The Muses are capricious when deciding upon whom to bestow their graces. A boy from Summerside may well be the next Big Name Poet. And, by implication, the next Big Name Novelist is as likely to come from Cape Breton as from anywhere else.

We see this theme played out in many different ways. Larry tries to "psych out" his mentor, "the greatest living poet," and discovers that Jim Arsenault is a needy, manipulative, alcoholic married to a woman who doesn't fit properly into any of her clothes, smokes like a chimney, and tells all the poets to fuck off. Janet, the hick cousin who gets knocked up, turns out to have staged the whole thing so that she could observe her family's reaction. The result is a published paper and admission to a graduate program at Columbia — hardly what Larry would have predicted for the girl's future. And then there is Charles Slaughter, the 300-pound football player who, inexplicably, loves to hang with poets yet gives them all noogies and passes most of his time in states of altered consciousness. It is to Slaughter that Coady gives the final word, a poem of his own, banged out on Larry's typewriter while somewhat intoxicated. Is it any good? Who's to say?

Article Author: David Barker

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