Mean Boy (2006) Part Duex : Coady on New Brunswick

So I finished Mean Boy around midnight past, and then I woke myself up in a coughing fit at around two. I needed a throat lozenge, which don't go away quickly, so I picked up a book of short stories I am reviewing for Books in Canada (by the way, my last review is going to be on the March cover "Newfoundland in Letters" - 2500 words). The book is called The Watermelon Social, by Elaine McCluskey. It is published by one of the snaziest small presses in all of Canada, Gaspereau Press in NS, so it is a great aesthetic experience just to be around this book. Opening the cover though, I must say, the experience dims. And in this dim light, Coady's brilliance hovers over me like a sublime thing (Wordsworth's Mountain in the Prelude). Damn, Coady was in control of her writing in Mean Boy. The text was more sparse then that of Strange Heaven, which was decorated like a rococo palace with Catholicism. Mean Boy is crisp. She is able to twist and turn around the social world she has created, she also does backflips with the whole writing about writing thing. The book is ironic to the core, yet Coady's irony avoids the dark nihilism that hovers around so much of postmodernity (especially in pop-rock from NY). What bothers me about Mean Boy is that it is not as rich a text as Strange Heaven, but I would say this is because of two things: Coady no longer lives in the Maritimes, so she writes with a stale pallet (though she is still sharper than I); she has attempted to push herself beyond what she knew in terms of setting - we're no longer in Cape Breton Toto.

This last point is significant. Who, besides the great David Adams Richards, choses New Brunswick as a setting for fiction? Coady has done just that. And NB is no walk in the Lake District, let me assure you, especially the Tantramar Marsh area, where her book is set (Sackville). Tantramar has barely risen from the ocean. It is a mud flat with some golden sprouts of wild hay and more radio towers then you can safely count while driving by on the THC (I mean TCH, though the last is true as well). The British would treat NB with no more nobility then they would Lancaster. All they used it for was a shipyard - a place to find masts for tall ships. This is why the forest of NB looks like freshly grown stubble (well perhaps the Irvings have something to do with this). NB is a woodlot (a woodlot that I have a fondness for, mind you).

Here's Coady on Moira, Jim's wife:

Larry: "You told her to fuck off?"
Slaughter puts his sandwich down on the table between us.
"You ever meet his wife? Oh, yeah, you met here out at their place that time with the dumplings. She's a complete bitch, right?"
"Well," I balk. I want to explain to Slaughter that Moria is not actually a complete bitch. Slaughter is from suburban Ontario and so he wouldn't understand. Moira is a New Brunswick woman, I want to explain - but that doesn't work because I've met women like Moira in PEI as well. Moira is a rural person, is the best way I can think to describe it. She doesn't put on airs. Moira would never have been exposed to airs in her life, is the thing - and if she ever was, she would dismiss them immediately.
As airs.
"She's just - she's harsh," is what I end up saying. "She's blunt."
"She's a douchebag," Slaughter contends... (271)

Moira in action, hosting a party:

It's hard not to watch the way Ruth watches Moira. She sits on the couch beside Dekker, draped in a shawl the colour of dried blood over a burgundy velvet dress. She looks like mulled wine. She is the best-dressed person in the room.
"Can I help you with anything?" she said to Moira upon our arrival.
Moira, in a pair of floppy-assed jeans, seemed physically unable to look upon Ruth. Her eyes kept darting toward and then bouncing away from her.
"I don't plan on doing a goddamn thing," she huffed. "Beers in the fridge, food and wine's on the table. If anyone needs anything else they can talk to that one there." And jabbed her cigarette at Jim, crouched by his record player. "I been cutting fuckin' vegetables all afternoon." She held up her hands to show us where she had nicked herself in the process.
"Well, its very nice to meet you," said Ruth after a glance at Dekker.
The comment met with Moira's back.
"Don't tease the dog." she was yelling, hustling her assless way across the room.
"She's so thin," murmured Ruth. (343-4)

Moira on the way students treat Jim:

"The bunch of you," Moira complains, "just treat him like King Shit. I don't know what in hell is wrong with you. Your husband, too," Moira turns abruptly on Ruth, who doesn't even flinch, who actually smiles a little [Ruth is Scandinavian - If that explains anything]
"For Christ's sake, that one could be - he could take a crap on your kitchen floor," Moira sputters, turning toward me again. "He could be hitting himself on the head with a hammer saying, how do you like that, now, boys? Whaddya thing about that little trick? And what would you bastards say?"
At this point Moira actually pauses as if I'm going to answer her.
"I don't know," I tell her.
She folds her arms. They remind me of two tree roots woven together above the earth. [how poetic - Coady likes to interject the poetic aspect with Larry - makes him real]
"You don't know," says Moira, turning to Ruth. "He doesn't know."
"Perhaps they would say," offers Ruth in her strange accent, "yes, King Shit. Very Good, King Shit."
For the first time since I met her, Moira laughs. She laughs worse than Ruth. She coughs as she laughs, a smoker's cough, harsh, wet, and red-sounding. Gravel scrapes her windpipe. It makes me want to shrivel up and die.
"Very good, King Shit," caws Moira, smacking Ruth across a velvet thigh. Aren't they just getting along like a house on fire...(356-7)

Well Moira is a minor character, but shit is she sharp. I do believe it is the little local details that Coady taps which make her work universal.