The New World, Anew

TWENTY-ONE pages into this first novel by the hitherto unknown Montreal author Colin McAdam, Jerry McGuinty – builder, developer, loving and ineffectual husband and father – enters the story with such extraordinary aplomb that most of the Canadian novels I have read over the last five years, including many acclaimed ones, seem suddenly ordinary, their characters interchangeable, their tone familiar, and their structures wanting. After a splendid decade, Canadian fiction is showing incipient signs of being on the wane. Our novels are getting larger, a surplus of multi-generational and historical sagas have taken on the trappings of formula, and even our authors of so-called “urban” novels surprise no one any more. The bulk of Canadian fiction is in a rut.

Still, before we decide the thrill is gone, how about these few lines to set a new standard?

Thirteen neighbourhoods, five thousand roofs, thirty thousand outside walls, and a rock-hard pair of hands. That is what I have built. I have laid iron, I have laid iron mesh, I have breathed more iron filings than the men who built the railroads. And I have plastered.

My father was a plasterer.

His father was a plasterer. His father’s father was a plasterer (and plastering was the death of his father). I, my friend, am a plasterer. Lean forward here and I will show you my card.

Now hold on, what is happening?

We have a builder for a hero, and Ottawa as the locale, in a novel that’s often very funny?

I found out about Some Great Thing last August, when the book’s U.K. editor, Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape, sent it to me with a note describing it as the best first novel he had read since Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. (Robertson, who was MacLeod’s editor in Britain, is not given to easy praise.) At the time, McAdam, a protégé of the poet Anne Carson’s who had recently returned to Canada from Australia,had no Canadian publisher. Then it was pointed out to his American agent that the novel would not be eligible for Canada’s most prestigious fiction prize, the Giller, were Harcourt’s American copies merely distributed here. There was a late scramble for Canadian rights, which Raincoast won. Certainly, Some Great Thing must be considered, already, a shoo-in for this year’s prize short lists.

Some Great Thing tells the story of two thirty-something men living in Ottawa in the 1970s, at a time when the capital was burgeoning. Jerry McGuinty, the aforementioned builder, is one. Simon Struthers, a priapic and vapid bureaucrat who has acquired his position through family and not merit, is the other. To the degree that such a book is possible in Canada, Some Great Thing is, among other things, a novel about class. Simon, aware of his own privilege, is one of those children of Ottawa mandarins (just how many are there?) who appear quietly destined, as was our current prime minister, for political office. Where McGuinty is a man of action, filled with a sense of possibility, his body hardened by use and his ambition by necessity, he is also at the receiving end of life’s events. Struthers, his career path orchestrated since boyhood, is effete and slight, but able, through the privilege of his class and position, to cause actions that have consequences. He does not accomplish much, though he sleeps with women a lot. He is a predator, mostly of himself. He is full of self-regard, but he does not share McGuinty’s self-possession.

Struthers and McGuinty cross paths only once, in a meeting without consequence, and yet their lives intersect. Through the parallel course of their two stories, McAdam creates an amusing and quite genuine portrait of our corner of the New World – of Canada, as much as the nation’s capital. Both places are new, quite possibly dull – and invented. Ottawa, after all, is a project even more artificial than the country is, and the need to develop it is what ties the stories of the two men together. The urge is personal in the builder’s case – what the poet Tim Lilburn calls “the entrepreneurial look, the remodeling gaze” – and abstract in the bureaucrat’s. Land! McGuinty wants it; Struthers controls it. McGuinty sees Ottawa’s Greenbelt not as some wilderness in which survival is the issue, but as space, that’s all – space to make lives better, and easier. McGuinty is a developer. He is not intimidated by nature; he shifts it around, fills it in. He wants to develop houses, malls, and towns, sees “progress blowing from one block to the next like seeds in a springtime field.” He has no pretence about any of the rural or “environmental” properties the acres he needs to build on might possess.