Lynn Coady captures masculine stereotypes

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This article was published 17/09/2011 (5476 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GORDON Rankin, known in his small Maritime town as “Rank,” is a towering hulk of a teenager.

His puny dad, owner of an ice-cream franchise, thrusts him into the role of bouncer and forces him to evict trouble-makers.

One night, the reluctant bruiser throws a fateful punch. Haunted by the incident and its aftermath, he goes to university on a hockey scholarship and is pressured to be an on-ice goon, then a menacing bar bouncer.

Lynn Coady’s new novel The Antagonist is Rank’s troubled story, told from his perspective at about age 40. It explores what it’s like to be cast as a violent, dull-minded villain just because you’ve got a body like a brick wall.

Although hockey plays a minor part in the narrative, the recent deaths of three NHL enforcers lend it a chilling relevance.

The glowingly reviewed novel, longlisted for the coveted $50,000 Giller Prize, is the fourth by the Cape Breton-bred Coady, a rising literary star now based in Edmonton.

The 41-year-old writer gives a reading from The Antagonist Monday at 8 p.m. on a program with four other authors at the Thin Air writers’ festival. The event (tickets $12 at the door) is at the Shaw Performing Arts Centre (Manitoba Theatre for Young People) at The Forks.

Coady’s dad actually owned a Dairy Queen in their Nova Scotia town. Her brother was the resident muscle.

“The drug-dealer boys would loiter and make my dad angry,” she remembers. “My older brother was kind of the enforcer — he would ‘take out the trash’ every weekend.

“I imagined a tragic version. What if there was this great big guy who didn’t want to fight?”

Our society seems to want certain men to represent brute force, Coady says.

“Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It’s like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated.

“There’s this archetypal male figure…. He doesn’t need to do a lot of talking or thinking. He just has to be strong, for all of us.”

The novelist grew up with three brothers. In the book, she does a remarkable job of capturing the mean, insulting, competitive dynamics between young male friends.

“I was always watching the boys and how they interacted,” she recalls. “It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.”

The Antagonist raises questions about writers “stealing” characters and stories. Rank is outraged when an old university buddy publishes a novel with a thuggish character based on him. Yet as Rank pours out his own version of the truth by email, his view of the “theft” shifts.

That rose out of Coady’s experience with her previous novel, Mean Boy.

“I had used portions of the life of a poet named John Thompson,” she says. “The character in the book wasn’t John Thompson, but a lot of what happens in his life is very similar to what happened to Thompson in the ’70s. He died tragically young….

“When I was in New Brunswick at Mount Allison University where he taught, reading from Mean Boy, there were people in the audience … who stood up and called me out on it. It was kind of terrifying, and at the same time really interesting.”

People who knew the poet swung between complaints that the character was nothing like Thompson, and too much like Thompson. “They didn’t seem to know which one offended them more,” Coady says. “The paradox of that really fascinated me.”

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca