Some Great Thing - Softcover

McAdam, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616954434 ISBN 13: 9781616954437

Publisher: Soho Press, 2014

Synopsis

“A powerful, poetic, bawdily funny, and tenderly sad novel about class, about love, about drink, about poetics, about land, and about money—a few of the salient things that life and history are made of.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

In his highly acclaimed debut novel, Colin McAdam depicts the struggle between two men involved in building a city’s future: developer Jerry McGuinty, blue collar, selfmade, a master craftsman, and Simon Struthers, a civil servant from a prominent, wealthy background who shapes land-use policy. Jerry has a blind spot for his alcoholic wife, and Simon moves between women, consumed by a frantic emptiness. When their two stories begin to intertwine, their lives and ambitions are set on a collision course. A richly observed story of family, class, love and the individual contributions we make to the bigness of the world, Some Great Thing is a powerful work from one of the most exciting voices of his generation.

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Review

Canadian writer Colin McAdam's Some Great Thing demonstrates much promise but shows a bit of the raggedness to be expected from an ambitious debut effort. McAdam spends nearly a quarter of the book slowly introducing his interpretation of Ottawa, experimenting with first- and third-person narration, and framing the lives of his two protagonists, Simon Struthers and Jerry McGuinty. McGuinty is an ambitious developer with a passion for plaster and for the lunch truck cook, Kathleen Herlihy. Struthers, a man crippled by the reputation of his famous father, is a civil servant in the National Capital Division. Only at the end of Part Two (of Six) do Struthers and McGuinty meet, and Part Three begins the real unfolding of the story. Some readers will have abandoned McAdam long before, during his explorations of the corrupt process for getting small business loans or in his fragmented presentation of Struthers's sexual appetites. They may also stumble over McAdam's occasional lapses into pseudo-poetry, placed in the mouths of working-class characters ("...I will tell you about a line like 'S' and the taste of the milk of lost hope.")

Yet, as McAdam moves forward, the work he has done early on establishing relationships and experimenting with form builds momentum. The ageing Struthers's sexual dalliances and his struggle to live up to the promise of the visionary Dreambook (a list of grand ideas prepared by one of the early city mandarins) lead him to seek distraction, inevitably, in a tragic passion for Kweyt Schutz, the daughter of one of his co-workers. Meanwhile, McGuinty's pursuit of "some great thing to do" manifests in sprawling suburbs, shopping malls, conflicts with Struthers over development plans, and a quest to build a relationship with his lost son.

McAdam's affinity for development and city planning makes perfect sense when considering the complexity of Some Great Thing. While it is far from perfect, there is great talent on display in the book, and McAdam's craftsman-like approach suggests he will only improve with each new construction. --Patrick O'Kelley

About the Author

Colin McAdam's novel Some Great Thing won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK. His second novel, Fall, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize. He has written for Harper's and lives in Toronto.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1616954434
• ISBN 13: 9781616954437
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416