The Antagonist, Lynn Coady (House of Anansi Press)
Lynn Coady’s fourth novel, recently shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is her most stylistically ambitious to date. The story of hockey enforcer Gordon “Rank” Rankin’s revenge on a former university classmate who has written a novel modelled on Rank’s life simultaneously updates the epistolary novel for the Internet era and provides a striking example of one of fiction’s most notoriously difficult figures: the unreliable narrator. It also solidifies Coady’s reputation as one of this country’s foremost chroniclers of the masculine psyche, particularly that part that is obsessed with violence as a problem-solving technique. “What you can’t account for, when you punch a person in the head,” says Rank, “is how they are going to land.” Coady is a brilliant observer of both head shots and the various ways the recipients land. Oh, and she’s also painfully funny.
