The New World, Anew

Anybody who has travelled to Ottawa by air knows the land McGuinty craves – it’s what remains of the forlorn stretch of uninteresting forest that divides the airport from the city, physically unappealing land that might as well have been developed. It has the National Research Council’s wind tunnel on it now, and this, it turns out, was Struthers’s unusual plan for the same land. A long bureaucratic correspondence, in which Struthers is expert (“his primary tool was the memo, the oldest and noblest form of official advice, born with bureaucracy itself”) impedes McGuinty and determines the relationship between the two. Does this creed sound familiar, anyone?

When Simon’s job was created, the words ‘culture’, ‘heritage’, ‘values’ and ‘future generations’ were mumbled into coffee and were gradually growing louder. The Government knew what it needed for itself, more or less, and it now felt responsible for setting in the landscape an idea of what it was to be Canadian.

One of the distinct pleasures of Some Great Thing is the degree to which its author understands work and its place in our lives. He understands the comedy and the consequences of it, knows how we identify ourselves by it – he’s interested in it. Of course Struthers is a bureaucrat – and of course, being one, he is not inclined to see the problems in front of him, let alone deal with them, even when they lie in his own character. Of course, as McGuinty is a builder, he would believe that he can fix things, anything, and not see that broken family members will not be repaired unless they choose to be. McAdam sees that particular folk are drawn to work of a particular kind and that, in turn, doing that work shapes character.

It would be silly to make a rule of it, but perhaps the author who writes from away – that select writers’ school from which many of any country’s best novelists still graduate – is more likely to notice the obvious and the telling in what might otherwise be too near to see clearly. Canadian writers tend to work so hard to find their subjects, too hard, as if they are not convinced by what is familiar unless it is sufficiently contrived – and therefore new and at the cutting edge. McAdam – writing for readers who do not live in this country, perhaps? – plumbs terrain so close at hand that, after reading him, you cannot quite believe that no writer in this country has introduced you to Jerry McGuinty or Simon Struthers before. Not everyone may have employed a contractor, but who has not lived in a house? And who has not been appalled by stalling, corrupt, or otherwise useless government? (If you say no to the last, then you can’t be reading this in Nova Scotia, Ontario, or British Columbia, certainly.) This is what is most refreshing about McAdam’s book – the sheer ability to find material in panoramas that even the freshest “new” voices in Canadian fiction have overlooked.

McGuinty – winning some battles, losing others, never quite in control – is one of those infrequent characters in fiction whose emblematic aspects are conveyed without ever distracting the reader from the immediacy of his company on the page. He is in the line of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, or that earlier developer in Canadian fiction, Duddy Kravitz. He is true to the time in which he is located and presented, just as Willy Loman was to an America that had outgrown him, Bascombe was to the United States crowded and faltering as it reached middle age, or Kravitz to a Canada reluctantly accommodating Montreal’s striving second generation of immigrant Jews. But McGuinty, unlike Kravitz, is neither mean nor duplicitous. He’s a fundamentally decent man, keen on opportunity, though not social standing. Living well is good enough for him.

Life happens, however. It cannot always be managed, and when McGuinty causes an accident that almost kills his wife, Kathleen, he discovers how much of other people’s unhappiness – and in particular hers – he has failed to notice while constructing his way to a better life. At one point, when chasing down his runaway son, McGuinty stops in a shopping mall and finds himself in awe of all that he has been missing.

Look at the man looking for an electric knife, the granny looking for a bluer rinse, the woman here looking for the right speckled frame for her glasses. They depress me, my friend. They’re all looking for something, and their sad little faces are telling me there’s a reason for their looking and it’s not roast beef or a weak shade of blue. There’s something outside, I tell you, and it’s making them all come in here, something scary, something waiting for all of them.

I’m sitting there chinning my thoughts, having a cup of coffee, and I recall my Jerry and the reason I’m in the mall. My Jerry. I realise that to him I am probably that thing outside, that reason for getting lost in knick-knacks and the faces of strangers.

My quiet friend, let us take this moment to weigh the heaviness of that thought.

The novel is not without – well, indulgences, more than faults. A peroration on the Greek mythological figure Atalanta does not sit entirely well and a section on Struthers’s courtship of a gamine McGill student, Kwyet, has a slightly timid feel to it – as if the rookie McAdam had, in a shaky seventh inning, balked. But there is pathos and also wit in Some Great Thing, plenty of it, and McAdam’s wonderful ear for dialogue puts to shame the legion of Canadian writers who, asbad radio playwrights often do, tendto see conversation as an opportunity for a bit of authorial steering – though, something to ponder, the first nineteen pages of Some Great Thing are entirely the dialogue of Kathleen’s later alcoholic incoherence. Clearly an artistic choice had to be made here – to start here, as McAdam did, or with “The Story of Jerry McGuinty,” which begins on the novel’s utterly startling twenty-first page. The end redeems the choice – though, in truth, it’s the latter I hand to people as an introduction to the book.