The Antagonist [Hardcover]

Just imagine yourself scrolling through the literary fiction titles on Amazon, or perusing the racks at a B&N - if one of the outlets remains open in your community - and coming across a new release written by a ghost from your past. Checking out the back cover photo, you discover although the years have engorged your old pal with a little extra girth, there is no doubt the author is your former classmate and as luck would have it, past confidant. Scanning through it, you rapidly realize while your friend may have the privilege of authorial license there is little question it is essentially an uncomplimentary roman à clef based on his perceptions of you. I don't know about the next guy, but I know in my case impassioned or antagonistic might be among the tepid descriptions of my emotional reactions, although who really deserves the attribution of antagonist might be debatable.

Thirty-eight year old ex- college hockey player Gordon "Rank" Rankin, Jr. finds himself in a comparable state as a chance encounter with another former classmate puts him on the path to discovery of a novel penned by Adam Grix, who we eventually come to understand was easily his closest friend during their first two years of college...or university since we're talking about Canada here. The plot of Adam's novel is never explained but based on Rank's reaction, it's evident thematically he was the inspiration for one of the major characters. He decides to reestablish contact with his old buddy via Facebook where nearly all authors with an ego (and let's be real here, name one that hasn't) have created pages in anticipation of effusive, complimentary messages from adoring fans and see if Adam, who we will discover as the story plays out may or may not have been precisely the introverted bookish, manipulative weasel Rank first presaged him to be amongst their college fraternal quartet of friends, is willing to take a look at a little piece Rank claims to have written.

But, as envisioned by author Lynn Coady in a variation of the epistolary form employing emails as his communicative connection, Rank's true objective is to set the record straight while secondarily launching some vitriolic missives aimed at his `ole buddy,' with his father often the victim of collateral damage. As a result, his emails over the course of one summer are equally haphazardly submitted and entirely unanswered by his presumptive correspondent. His messages are expansive in context and tone, periodically rambling and discomforting yet deceptively cogent and coherent when evaluated over the course of the book.

Rank is resigned to taking personal inventory, addressing and answering the questions about ourselves we seldom want to examine; acknowledging his reluctant outward acceptance of the role of man-child thrust upon him by nearly all external interactions due to his early physical maturation whilst emotionally and psychologically his genuine aspirations were to follow a very different path. Author Coady imbues him with first rate cynical abilities which he aims at himself and his recollections of most of the other characters he refers to in his emails.

The narration of the book reminded me of Russian nesting dolls as within the body of the emails, the narrative migrated between third, first and at times, second person. The emails commenced with the feel of merely another tale of college excesses related by an omniscient observer. The absolute beauty of it is how Coady integrates and actually highlights the transitions of narration to the point of pulling back the barrier to the fourth wall.

As it is Rank's rebuttal and with the confrontational nature at the outset, what he thought would be his retaliatory foray against what he intuitively believed to be a violation of an implicit trust, only a few of the characters alluded to are fully developed or did I feel they needed to be. I felt like I knew of and had had personal experiences with every single character in this book: Rank's friends, his parents, the girlfriend he only talks of reluctantly, the morally principled social worker/hockey coach, the hometown reprobates, the detritus at the college townie bar and most vividly, Rank, himself. As he begins to lose sight of his original intent - if he ever had a cogent vision of it -he does begin to compose a novel or at more appropriately, his memoir, an exsanguination obviously a long time coming.

The result is an exemplary novel by Lynn Coady who deserves all of the accolades she has received and certainly wider readership.

Lynn Coady's new novel has a neat premise. Gordon Rankin Jr, known as Rank, was horrified to discover himself fictionalized in a novel by an old college friend, so he's decided to send that old friend an insistent series of e-mails in which he'll tell the real story that Adam Grix left out. The issues of writerly ethics that this brings up are complicated and important, but Coady is less interested in them than in Rank's tragic story and his defiant, mocking, yet yearning voice. The epistolary format fades pretty quickly into the background, and deservedly so, as it's a little hard to believe that someone with Rank's educational history would write the way he does. What's never hard to believe, though, are Coady's pitch-perfect portrayals of the key relationships in Rank's life: with his domineering, cantankerous father Gord, and with Adam and the other members of their social circle. She has a keen eye for how fathers and sons can be just the right combination of alike and different to get on each other's nerves, and for how certain young men bond and express emotional ups and downs indirectly without abandoning the immature, "masculine" behavior that leads some to imagine they don't have emotional lives. Add in a sharp sense of humor, and you get a vivid, thoroughly enjoyable portrait of the forces that shaped one early twenty-first century man, and the degree to which he has or has not escaped them. THE ANTAGONIST is a small masterpiece of character study.

Having discovered that a high school friend has written a book that includes stories from Rank's life, Rank writes a series of unanswered emails to the author to explain the story. We don't get to see the story that Rank responds to and it takes a big portion of the book for it to start to make sense. The first third of the book drags.

The expository technique, telling the story through email, just feels wrong. I find it hard to believe anyone would write like that in email. I could believe that someone would dictate that story or tell it to a therapist. Since the emails are given dates and times, I find it hard to believe those email came out like that on the first go with no editing. I tend not to like these new-fangled novels that try to update the diary idiom in this way. It's just not for me.