Booking It: The Antagonist by Lynn Coady

I appreciate what you are trying to do, Lynn Coady. Making your protagonist a large, scary-looking, yet sympathetic man was bold. Rank could easily have come across as whining about winning the genetic lottery, but instead he presents a frank account of what life is like for a peaceful man to be stuck in a bruiser’s body. Rank’s development over the course of the novel, and his hilarious and flowing voice kept me reading page after page. See, I appreciate all of that, Ms. Coady, but I had trouble with just one small fact: I am a little man, and it just seemed unfair for Rank to complain about being a big one.

For those not in on the terrible joke I just made above, Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist is presented in the form of a series of angry emails to an author. Before the story begins, the protagonist, Rank, finds a novel written by his old friend Adam. When Rank cracks open the book, he is shocked to find a brutal and dishonest portrayal of himself. Angry at his old friend’s betrayal, Rank begins writing emails to Adam, detailing the parts of his life that Adam misrepresented. While Rank’s account begins as an enraged rant, it soon settles down and transforms into something more nuanced. As the pages turn, Rank begins to weave a mysterious, disjointed narrative of a violent, thoughtful, and tragically funny life.
Believe me, the pages will turn. I often found myself stumbling to class or meetings in the mornings, bleary eyed and confused after another late night spent with Rank and his thoughts. The Antagonist is nothing if not funny, and that — paired with its intriguing plot — was enough to keep me chugging through it. As for length, it runs about 300 pages, so it should not take too much time from those of us with busy schedules.

Practicalities aside, though, The Antagonist presents a surprisingly deep narrative. Or at least it was surprising to me. This was a book I picked up in a random shop because I thought its cover looked cool (totally judge books by their covers by the way, it has only ever worked out for me). After reading the first chapter, I thought I would be in for a funny jaunt through an angry man’s thoughts. What I did not expect was how attached I would get to Rank, and how he would change how I looked at people. One of the central conceits of the novel is that Rank is always assumed to be something of a brute due to his size and strength. The police don’t trust him, his friends are kind of scared of him and his tiny father uses him as a means of being vicariously huge.

As I mentioned before, I am a little man, and it was hard for me to imagine Rank as a big one at first. He came across as too humble, too thoughtful and too measured to be a big guy in the novel. The big guy is supposed to be there to hit stuff. If he is smart, he is supposed to be smart about manly stuff, and espouse on the virtues of courage and manly restraint. That’s how life works, right? Well I was a good couple of chapters in before I started to notice how much of a jerk I was being. Really, I was no better than Rank’s dad and if you read this book you will know how bad that realization must have felt. Rank morphed in my head at that moment. He went from the reasonably tall and well-muscled guy I had been imagining, to a giant amongst men. Suddenly, I understood the fear that people had for Rank, and I also learned to respect him. The theme of the novel began to click into place, and I felt my head cogs begin to turn in excitement. Suddenly, The Antagonist was not just about how the world views people larger than them, it was about how I viewed people larger than me.

I can’t guarantee you will have the same experience with The Antagonist as I did, but I can guarantee that you will have a good time reading it. Coady has crafted an excellent story here, one that could easily mean a lot of things for a lot of people. There are certainly more themes at play than the big guy being a nice guy, and I would hate for anyone to miss out on it. After all, how much reading could you already have to do?