Mean Boy (2006)

So the gigs up, you caught me, I've been reading fiction again. Boy do I feel like I've had my hand in the cookie jar. I'm about 50 pages from the end of Lynn Coady's very funny Mean Boy (2006). This is the third novel from Coady, and I do believe it is my least favourite of them. In fact, her first offering, Strange Heaven (1998), was the best, followed by Saints of Big Harbour (2002). Both novels were set in Cape Breton, and she played with hickness and Catholicism throughout. Lawrence, "Larry", the protagonist of Mean Boy, is a presbyterian from PEI who comes to a fictional Mount Alison University called Westcock, on the NB side of the NB-NS border. When I say that Mean Boy is my least favourite of the last three, I still would give this book (on a very crude IMDB scale which should never be applied to any narrative) about an 8.2. Larry wants to be a poet. He has wanted to be a poet since he was twelve. He goes to Westcock because celebrated poet Jim Arsnault is there. Jim looks like the average hippy poet (the book is set in 1975). He has a bit of the Gary Snyder aesthetic about him. Chops his own wood, is married to a woman that Charles Slaughter calls "a Bitch", and Larry describes as just "an New Brunswick Woman" (His rational: Slaughter's from a suburb of Toronto, he wouldn't know). Anyway, Coady starts dropping hints that Jim is a bit eccentric about 100 pages in. We find out that Jim has not made tenure, and that Larry is going to come to his aid with a student petition. About 200 pages are spent on the petition, much of which are very funny. We also spend a lot of time in class having poems reviewed. Jim and Larry start getting drunk together. Larry feels like he is making progress, while Jim feels like he has someone to lean on. Soon we find out that Jim is a little unstable. Larry gets a phone call from Jim's wife - she tells him to come drink with Jim and discuss Oedipus Rex. When Larry arrives, it feels like he has rolled up to the curb of Heathcliff's home in Wuthering Heights. Pure hell. Jim has an axe in hand. He looks dirty and disheveled. In his other hand he holds the bloody body of a crow. He has just chopped off its head. He then ties it to a tree, while his dog, Panda runs crazily below, covered in blood. Jim's rationale? Crow was teasing Panda. So he shot it, cut off its head and tied it to a tree as a warning to other crows. He then claims he really admires crows, but that this one just had a bad streak. Larry finds out that Jim has a Jack Nicholson-from-the-Shining streak.

More stuff happens. Larry gets high on mushrooms. So does Slaughter and a guy named Todd, who trips out at the front of the bar. Wont turn around, keeps looking in the mirror - feels a bit apprehensive: Todd: "I just feel a bit apprehensive". This is a very funny part of the book.

Scariest part of the book? that Coady has real insight into the student-supervisor worship phenom. As I mentioned, I'm not finished the book, but I would recommend it, especially to Grad students. Lots of fun. I'll post one of Larry's poems later - quite funny. Out.

PS: A poem by Lawrence Campbell

the ass of the head
and what is in it,
or is not -
The question
of which should take
its rightful place up top-
Is the axis
the ass-kiss
the pinhead
on which this angel

squats

December 7, 1975 (189)

...
A highlight:

Sometimes, even when I'm not writing, just the feel of being alone in my apartment in front of the typewriter is enough. I take off my shirt, I can see myself, I can see what I look like sitting here wearing nothing but jeans and glasses, me and my pale teenage limbs. I look like a poet. I know that I do. I believe in it, those days.
I, I'll type. And that will be enough.
Then there are the other days, when nothing is enough. The poem grins. It grins because it knows it is a terrible poem. It grins in embarrassment. It grins in pity. It grins in superiority. I may be a terrible poem, it grins, but at least I have one comfort. At least I'm not a terrible poet. At least I'm not the guy who sat in front of a typewriter for two hours coming up with the likes of me. (4)