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chris_chester 's review for:
The Antagonist
by Lynn Coady
As a novelist, what happens when you try and use the story of somebody you know or knew as inspiration for a project? No matter how many layers of poetic license you slather on the thing, you're going to get things wrong, both in fact and in spirit. Maybe sometimes intentionally so, to preserve the anonymity of your subject or just to make a better story.
But flip that around. What is it like, then to be the subject? That's the premise of Lynn Coady's The Antagonist, which is written from the perspective of, well, the antagonist, confronting the author of this imagined work of fiction.
It's a really compelling literary device that allows the story to unfold in an unusual and interesting way. The chapters come in bursts of emails, from the antagonist Rank to the author Adam. They unfold sort of as you imagine they might in this situation.
The perspective is stilted and accusatory. Rank fumbles at deciding which imagined inaccuracies to address first. So the narrative only slowly builds over time, like waves striking a beach, hitting in different places and different ways, but all in service of exposing what lays beneath the sand. You can see the broad contours of his shame early on, but the details only become clear after multiple approaches from different angles.
It's ultimately a story of a big kid. Big as in large. The story of a guy who from an early age people look at and assume they know what kind of person he is. He's someone capable of hurting people. He's someone who looks like a man and is treated like a man, but is as much of a boy as anyone a foot shorter or 100 pounds lighter.
To be clear, this is not a story for which I typically have a tremendous amount of sympathy. I've always been short and skinny and always bristled at what the world made me of just because of physical characteristics out of my control. Short people (especially men) are considered less attractive as a whole. They're afforded no inherent social status. They make less money. If they express anger, they must be suffering from short man syndrome.
So I don't weep for the tall or strong, as a general rule. So I'm actually really quite impressed that Coady (herself obviously not a 6'4, 240 pound man) was able to sketch a portrait of a character that I could empathize with. She totally nailed the dynamic of a group of four college friends coming together and ultimately splintering apart. She captured the spirit of the reluctant enforcer that -- as a hockey fan myself -- I am intimately familiar with. It's a very masculine perspective and she seems still to have been able to wear his skin for a little bit.
It was really a riveting bit of storytelling from start to finish.
But flip that around. What is it like, then to be the subject? That's the premise of Lynn Coady's The Antagonist, which is written from the perspective of, well, the antagonist, confronting the author of this imagined work of fiction.
It's a really compelling literary device that allows the story to unfold in an unusual and interesting way. The chapters come in bursts of emails, from the antagonist Rank to the author Adam. They unfold sort of as you imagine they might in this situation.
The perspective is stilted and accusatory. Rank fumbles at deciding which imagined inaccuracies to address first. So the narrative only slowly builds over time, like waves striking a beach, hitting in different places and different ways, but all in service of exposing what lays beneath the sand. You can see the broad contours of his shame early on, but the details only become clear after multiple approaches from different angles.
It's ultimately a story of a big kid. Big as in large. The story of a guy who from an early age people look at and assume they know what kind of person he is. He's someone capable of hurting people. He's someone who looks like a man and is treated like a man, but is as much of a boy as anyone a foot shorter or 100 pounds lighter.
To be clear, this is not a story for which I typically have a tremendous amount of sympathy. I've always been short and skinny and always bristled at what the world made me of just because of physical characteristics out of my control. Short people (especially men) are considered less attractive as a whole. They're afforded no inherent social status. They make less money. If they express anger, they must be suffering from short man syndrome.
So I don't weep for the tall or strong, as a general rule. So I'm actually really quite impressed that Coady (herself obviously not a 6'4, 240 pound man) was able to sketch a portrait of a character that I could empathize with. She totally nailed the dynamic of a group of four college friends coming together and ultimately splintering apart. She captured the spirit of the reluctant enforcer that -- as a hockey fan myself -- I am intimately familiar with. It's a very masculine perspective and she seems still to have been able to wear his skin for a little bit.
It was really a riveting bit of storytelling from start to finish.