‘The Antagonist’ by Lynn Coady

Reviewed by Michael Bryson

Gordon Rankin is a big guy. A really big guy. He’s so big he needs to be careful not to get angry around women because then they cower at the sight of him. Dudes, on the other hand, look at him as a kind of challenge. Sure, he’s big. So what?

I can take him.

But no one can. No one quite knows what to do with him, and he’s more than a little lost himself. Adopted into a “down East” family (the location is never specified, but it’s clearly in the Maritimes), Rank, as he’s known, picks up a habit for casual violence in his teens and one altercation results in permanent brain damage to his opponent.

But that’s not the real story of Lynn Coady’s strong new comic novel, The Antagonist.

The real story takes place twenty plus years later when Rank discovers that a university friend whom he hasn’t seen in two decades has used him as a model for a novel. In the novel, the big oaf, a hockey enforcer like Rank, is described as having an “innate criminality.” Then he kills someone. Like Rank, when he was a teenager, his mother died. The Freudian connotations flow from cause into effect.

Except that the real Rank disputes that A leads to B.

This is the story of Coady’s novel. Rank writes a series of emails to his once upon a time friend, arguing that the novel within the novel got it all wrong.

And, not to give it away, he proves his point.

The emails are dated in between May and August 2009. They are, for the most part, one-sided. The readers do not get to see the replies sent by Adam, the ex-friend and novelist, such as they are. What we get is the story from Rank’s point of view, and the story is Rank was surprised to find himself portrayed in a novel. Shock! Horror! Dear Author, Rank writes, I have a story to share. It’s the story you missed. Listen up.

But, of course, there’s more to it than that, and thank goodness, because Rank can be a dunderhead. He’s upset how he’s been portrayed, but there’s a lot of self-reflection he hasn’t done, and his lack of self-awareness can be grating. That’s a minor criticism, though, because Rank — the hockey goon — turns out to be a great writer. All he needed was a laptop and a shot of motivation.

So who is the antagonist?

My Oxford Concise Dictionary gives the primary definition of “antagonist” as “an opponent or adversary.” The secondary definition is “a substance or organ that partially or completely opposes the action of another.”

The simple answer is that Adam, the author, is the one who opposes Rank. Adam is the one to whom all of the emails are aimed (though they are addressed to “you,” and sometimes the reader can start to feel the weight of the blame). Another answer, however, can be found if we stand back and look at what the novel and the novel within the novel have in common. That is, Rank’s life.

Who is Rank’s antagonist?

Not surprisingly, perhaps, it’s his father. His English-speaking working-class father, who married his French-speaking working class mother, and both adored her and treated her like shit and provided Rank with what Adam later calls a “virgin-virgin complex.” In other words, a view of women that is idealized and, by definition, unrealistic.

To explain this more would be to give away parts of the novel that the reader should discover for herself. What can be said, however, is that Adam’s novel missed the father story, and Rank fills it in with exuberant detail.

“They got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?” is Dad’s pick-up line.

Somehow, it works.

Rank doesn’t understand it either, and, approaching forty, he’s still trying to make sense of his life. It’s worked out, on the whole, despite his size, his poor decisions, his dysfunctional family, jail time, travelling about, massive drinking and drug taking, and early exposure to T.S. Eliot.

And, yes, it is a comic novel. Which means I can’t give away the punch line.

That would be cruel.

I don’t want to oppose one action or another.

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Anansi | 352 pages |  $32.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-0887842962