‘Hellgoing’ by Lynn Coady

Reviewed by Sue Sinclair from uncorrected proofs (originally posted July 8, 2013)

In many ways Lynn Coady’s strengths in this new collection of stories remain what they’ve been since her first novel, Strange Heaven, appeared in 1998. Then as now, her writing stood out for its wry humour, psychological insight, its pitch-perfect East-Coast bon mots and healthy sense of the absurd. Her work has, however, grown more complex over the years, formally and psychologically.  She has delved into the depths of some difficult characters, characters whose struggles are not always pretty.

Critics often speak of Coady’s work as compassionate. This may be surprising, for many of her protagonists fall short of compassion, and although Coady writes almost exclusively in the third-person, the point of view is restricted; the stories are narrated through the eyes of a single character. Which is to say that the point of view I inhabit as a reader is often not compassionate. But Coady creates compassion for her characters by pulling readers into their struggles. Indeed, these struggles often take the form of a conflict between compassion and self-protection. In Hellgoing’s “Wireless,” Jane is so intent on safeguarding her alcoholism from criticism that she can’t afford to let her guard down; in “Take This and Eat It” Sister Anita appears to resort to scorn in order to pre-empt rejection (“too low on the totem pole for the likes of her”); and in the title story Teresa feels compassion for her brother but can’t show it because she’s stinging from her father’s criticism.

Of course, these summaries don’t do justice to the nuanced and perhaps surprisingly delicate ways in which Coady reveals the forces at work in her characters.  I say “perhaps surprisingly” because the narrative voice is often so straightforward, even blunt, that her delicate touch may be unexpected. Yet despite the insights and occasions for compassion the narratives provide, my guard is up: I don’t feel safe around many of Coady’s protagonists. There’s a palpable volatility in many of them, either latent or manifest, and I often feel they could turn on me, the reader, as Sam turns on Marco in “Dogs in Clothes,” as Cal explodes at Rain in “The Natural Elements,” as Theresa turns on her brother. But my guardedness is a testimony to Coady’s skill in revealing the build-up of tension in her characters. I don’t, however, want to overstate these characters’ dark sides. They are often allergic to pretension, self-deprecating, witty, feisty and intelligent. Glimpses of vulnerability, furthermore, lower my guard again and again.

Not only do most of Coady’s protagonists harbour an injury of some kind that makes them unstable, but the effects of the injury are often doubled by self-awareness. Kim in “Body Condom,” for instance, is caught between apparently intractable scorn for the “unembarrassed exuberance” and sincerity of Hart, her West Coast lover, and a desire for just that exuberance and sincerity. And she knows she’s caught. But she can’t help acting out, and can’t help enjoying it: “Kim had blindsided him, and she was happy.” She sees what she’s doing, and can’t stop. Nor does she kid herself about the pleasure she takes in pulling the rug out from under Hart (the pun on ‘heart’ shouldn’t go unnoticed; the names of several of Coady’s characters are self-consciously Dickensian). It’s not easy to live with the degree of self-knowledge of a Kim.

Or consider Teresa: it’s only through her self-awareness that I know she is tormenting her brother, for it looks like she’s praising him: “he was looking great! He’d stopped smoking, she noticed. He seemed so fit, so together.” If I hadn’t been privy to her self-assessment, I wouldn’t, as an outsider to the relationship, understand this heaping of praise as a passive-aggressive form of criticism. But Teresa knows it for what it is. And that she omits this incident from the tale she tells her friends shows her shame.

The painful self-consciousness of the characters as well as the stories’ preponderance of irony—everything from Hart’s name to the irony of Teresa’s “praise” to Kim’s irony-informed horror of West Coast sincerity (“My God, thought Kim, she’s going to introduce me to her plants”)—brings something of the postmodern to bear on what is otherwise fairly traditional realism, despite a couple of nods to the writer’s presence. Not that literary realism is a ground for complaint—there’s nothing wrong with good old-fashioned storytelling, especially when stories are as complex and well-constructed as Coady’s. But the postmodern elements add a layer to these stories, and make them undeniably contemporary.

“Mr. Hope” (another ironic name) is the last story in Hellgoing and the most powerful. It also happens to be the only story in the book in the first person, an unusual move for Coady. I wonder if part of its power comes from the increased intimacy of the more directly confessional voice. The story also covers a much longer period of time than the others: the central storyline unfolds over a couple of decades, though those decades are skillfully collapsed into a few pages in a style reminiscent of Alice Munro.

We come to know Mr. Hope through the eyes of Shelly, a student who encounters him several times in the school system as his career advances. “Mr. Hope,” she says at the outset, “was monstrous to me,” but she develops a peculiar intimacy with him. Spoiler alert: Coady adeptly sets us up for a certain kind of abuse story, then confounds those expectations; it’s just not going to be that easy. Though Mr. Hope is definitely someone who crosses boundaries he shouldn’t. At one point he asks a room full of Grade Three children who will love him, and at another he shrieks at a child, “you little puke, you little worm!” It’s hard to communicate the twisted intimacy of this student-teacher relationship, but for a taste, consider this passage:

I looked up into his eyes. I was getting used to looking into his eyes. Every time I did it, I understood it was the right thing to do, even as it terrified me. It was like rolling up your sleeves to get a needle, or climbing to a great height—courageous. A feat. There were adults who looked you in the eyes and didn’t see you. Mr. Hope was not one of those people.

Shelly is terrified of Mr. Hope, yet wants to look in his eyes, to face the loveless monster and perhaps to humanize him as he does the children—for whatever his shortcomings, he sees them as human beings.  It’s as though she wants to return the favour. Unfortunately, although he may see children as human beings, he lacks the human touch. He’s angry, defensive, unpredictable. But he seems to recognize something in Shelly, as she does in him. He nicknames her ‘Greta,’ a humourless reference to a role-call mix-up once upon a time; the name becomes a weird kind of inside joke that marks their relationship as special. Shelley, for her part, has a private nickname for his belly, which she calls “his D.” The D she finds repulsive and even threatening at first: “a pot belly would have been okay. My dad had one of those and it was okay. But Mr. Hope was all belly, all outward thrust.” But as their bond develops, so does her relationship with his D. It’s a comical way of tracking a painful liaison.

If much has stayed the same in Coady’s work over time, some things have changed. She has moved away from exclusively East Coast settings, but excels at bringing an East Coast perspective to other parts of the country. “Body Condom” is a mirror image of 2000’s “Play the Monster Blind:” instead of an out-of-towner visiting a fiancé’s dysfunctional East Coast family, an East Coaster visits a fiancé’s dysfunctional West Coast family—in both cases to hilarious and unsettling effect. Readers will also find that many passages and climaxes in Hellgoing are more enigmatic than much of Coady’s earlier writing. In the new stories, cause and effect are not as carefully laid out for us; they sometimes shift toward what Jan Zwicky calls “oneric narrative,” which shows events as hanging together, related, but not necessarily causally.  The end of “Dogs in Clothes” for example, is not cut and dried. Sam (ironically) accuses Marco of accusing her, but of what it’s not easy to see. Sam has a couple of things to feel guilty about, but these are personal. Something about Marco’s writing has struck her as accusatory, but the link to her personal guilt is not immediately obvious. Is she being irrational? If so, why?

There are similar opaque moments elsewhere in Hellgoing—Sister Anita’s peculiar response to a bumblebee in “Take This and Eat It,” the scene in which Ned takes Jane’s head in his hands in “Wireless.” These are not the result of poor alignment of events or flaws in the backstory. They are densities, nodes where emotional tensions and past experiences erupt in strange ways, as they do in dreams, almost somatically. In these scenes image and feeling are uppermost and are not easily translated into a rational language. This is story on the verge of exceeding its narrative boundaries, and these moments are some of the most exciting in Coady’s work to date.

Anansi/Astoria | 240 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770893085