Mean Boy

A wonderfully painful satire on creative writing schools and the cult of the Canadian poet. Having gone to a writing school for my undergraduate degree, I re-experienced the awkwardness that is trying to find one's place--while trying very hard not to look like one is trying--in what seems like a mysterious and exclusive world.

At almost every turn I thought the author's instincts were bang on; one thing I like a great deal about Lynn Coady's writing is that she doesn't choose easy plot resolution. Her books are engaging, and yet unpredictable. I did think that there was a sort of false resolution at which she could have ended the book. The actual ending felt anticlimactic, and like an attempt to finish on a note of gravity, rather than show more humour. But the humour in the novel is so weighted by the empathy and discomfort I felt for Larry Campbell, that I would have preferred the 'false' ending to the real one. show less

Nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Larry Campbell has come to Woodcock University, where he now wishes to be called Lawrence, to become a poet under the tutelage of his hero, poet Jim Arsenault.

This is the funniest Canadian novel I've read in some time. Coady's evocation of the artist as a young man is pitch perfect: his need for approval, his naïveté, his grandiose dreaming. She fleshes out the novel with a cast of memorable characters, whose interactions are wonderfully comic.

Towards the end, the novel falters. The humour begins to disappear, which could well be deliberate, but more importantly, there is a sense that Coady is finding ways to spin out the story, to build false suspense by holding back what the narrator knows. show more

Nevertheless, well worth reading. show less