Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist was shortlisted for the Giller Prize this year, the country’s most illustrious literary award. Over the course of her career, she’s written a body of work that’s helped keep CanLit fresh. It’s the vivacity of her writing that I really like. Her authentic voice and lively characters, and how they’re bursting with humanity and life and convincing universal conflicts. And she’s funny with substance, a great sentence-level writer whose writing isn’t overly adorned with lyrical tendencies: It cuts right to the chase, to drive the story along. These are rare qualities, rare balances that I’ve not seen shine so brightly in another writer, which might be what makes her books so distinctly Lynn Coady. And so very good.
In The Antagonist, Lynn crafts characters who’ll make the real-life people you know seem lifeless and unconvincing. It’s a novel about a man born big, and his sheer size has had an outside influence on his life. By 21, “Rank” had three violent stains on his life, all attributable, somehow, to his not knowing his own strength, or, others knowing his strength and using it to accomplish their own goals. Rank tried desperately to wash himself clean of that past, but nearing 40, he finds out his college roommate has written a novel that shines a spotlight on those very stains.
The entirety of the novel is one big rant from Rank to his old friend. It’s Rank trying to set the record straight. And turning himself inside out to do so reveals the life of Gordie Rankin Jr. in all its tenderness, sadness, hilarity, and absurdness. It’s all memorably delivered by Lynn’s skilful storytelling, witty turns of phrase, and eye for what really defines a life.
Over the course of her career, the headlines about Coady’s work have gone from “One of the best new writers in Canada,” or “One of the most lively writers in Canada” to simply, “One of the best writers in Canada,” because of a suite of trademarked traits. Those traits have never been more alive in one of Coady’s novels as they are in The Antagonist. Here, they’ve clicked together and made an exceptionally vivacious Giller-worthy read.
What’s been a highlight or two for you and The Antagonist this year?
Hearing from readers online has been the best—this is the first novel I’ve published in the age of social media and it’s been exciting and pretty heart-warming to have people tweet their enthusiasm at me when they’re in the middle of the novel, or have just finished it. Someone Facebooked me the other day to say The Antagonist is one of only two novels that made her cry in her life. To get that kind of feedback from a total stranger is about as gratifying as it gets.
What are some of the best books you read in 2011?
I really liked How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. It’s probably the most original thing I’ve read all year.
What are you looking for from a book once you crack the spine?
A voice that strikes me as honest, breathing, uncontrived.
What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student with dreams of being a rich, widely heralded published author?
Probably “Why are you talking to me?” Then I’d say maybe try to read everything by Dan Brown, Stig Larson and Stephanie Meyer and see if you can distil what they are doing down to some kind of cross-genre formula, applicable to all three authors. Then follow that formula. Then send me the formula.
Any pet peeves with the book industry?
I don’t like to kick people when they’re down.
Now that you’re 5 or 6 books into your career, do you approach writing or crafting a novel any differently now that you’ve had a lot of experience and public reaction to your work? Are there things you’ve learned from writing the first few you applied to The Antagonist, for example?
Yep, I’m better at plot I think and I have a lot more respect for plot than I did as a younger writer. Around the time I was writing Mean Boy I started to develop an appreciation for the well-paced novel. I decided the reader’s experience was more important than my wish to indulge all my Big Philosophical Ideas, and I realized the writers I admired most were writers who were able to explore big ideas via basic storytelling, without a lot of fancy footwork. Now I believe that anything worth saying in a novel can be articulated through character and conflict—the two most rudimentary aspects of narrative. The writer just has to stand back and let the story do the work, weave its own profundities.
You’ve created some of the most memorable characters in CanLit, as far as I am concerned. If characters could get any more real or fun to read, yours would make half the real-life people I know seem dull and unconvincing. I know there’s no formula, but are there any tricks or conscious steps you take in your characterization to craft such well-wrought characters?
I pay pretty close attention to what makes people distinctive in real life, and I take a lot of pleasure in that distinctiveness. Cape Breton was a good place to cultivate an appreciation of “characters” growing up—forceful, undeniable personalities; people who express themselves in ways that make them unforgettable. At the heart of it, I’m just an aficionado. I’m naturally interested in the kind of people who make an impression, so subsequently I pay close attention to how it is they do it.
Also, a key to writing character is never losing sight of a) what your character most wants; b) what he or she is most afraid of. If you have those two things down cold they will be elucidated by everything your character says and every move he or she makes. And those two things have to be pretty big, cosmos-level things. It can’t be something like: He wants a car and he is afraid of getting beaten up—it’s gotta be, He wants to belong somewhere and he is afraid he will never be loved.
Many writers seem struck by the glitz and glamour of the Giller Award Gala. How was your experience?
What is there to say? I live in Edmonton and barely ever leave my house. Next thing I know I’m sitting one table over from Robbie Roberson and getting tapped on the shoulder by Malcolm Gladwell. Also: people in headsets chasing me with panicked looks on their faces every time I got up to go to the bathroom. It was a lot of fun.
Writers wind up in all sorts of day jobs, but how’d you become an advice columnist at the Globe and Mail?
This is a boring answer: They asked me and I said yes. I’m done now, though, I just wrapped that gig up in the new year.
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