Lynn Coady’s terrific third novel, Mean Boy, comically chronicles the coming of age of Lawrence “Larry” Campbell at a small liberal arts college in New Brunswick. His neurotic determination to become a great Canadian poet (“I can’t hang myself in the stairway, it would be too derivative,” he muses) forces him to into the hands of his self-destructive, brilliant, and possibly dangerous poetry professor, Jim.
“The big theme of this book is betrayal-to grow and change and be betrayed,” Coady explains during a recent interview at her publisher’s office. “Poetry and art have always been anomaly to the working class. And to separate yourself, you have to betray the conventions of where you grew up in order to move on.”
What was this process like for Coady, a working-class Cape Bretoner?
“Painful. But that’s what you have to do; you have to move away from the people you love. You have to make the break and redefine yourself. And it’s hard to come home for Christmas and realize that you’ve changed. I remember saying to my father, “Hey maybe being gay isn’t such a weird thing after all.” And having him go, ‘What are they teaching you in this school?'”
Coady deliberately set her novel in the 1970s, the peak of the thriving Canadian poetry scene.
“I’m a big Canadian poetry nerd,” she admits. “And I’m totally enamoured with that period in the ’70s, when poetry started to become a big thing. Suddenly it was cool to be a Canadian. It was cool to write about the Maritimes.”
Nationalist pride is an issue of concern for the characters in Mean Boy, who must make a choice whether to highlight their own admittedly unglamorous backgrounds or emulate the European poets they admire. In Coady’s past novels (she also pens a column for the Globe and Mail and was a senior editor at Adbusters before her recent move to Edmonton), the Cape Breton scenery and the working-class Maritimes landscape are always featured.
“People take different approaches,” to writing about Canada, Coady notes. “Some writers I find have a really dogmatic approach that ‘no one cares about Canada, that it’s a global world, so I’m going to set this book in World War II or Tuscany,’ which I think is stupid. Like there’s something wrong with setting a book in Canada. And other writers deliberately write their books mentioning maple syrup and Pierre Trudeau because they think it gives them an edge, which is stupid, too. If you start writing from fetters and conventions it limits the work’s appeal. You end up transposing a U.S. reality.
“What I want to know is, why is Nunavut really that different from Indiana? You know what I mean?” she continues.
For Mean Boy, Coady was required to write poetry-specifically bad student poetry from the mindset of the various characters, a process one imagines would be quite enjoyable.
“I find writing poetry hard,” she admits. “But yeah, I guess I just kind of got into the character’s head and ended up writing tons of terrible poetry, which was actually kind of fun.”
