by JULIET WATERS

In last weekend’s New York Times Book Review section, Joseph Finder laments the disappearance of “The Young Man From the Provinces.” Used to be that literature was crawling with examples of TYMFTP, the rural guy set on making his mark in the world, but, he writes, “In today’s literary fiction, the craving for worldly success has become the love that dare not speak its name.” Doesn’t sound like he’s read Mean Boy, Lynn Coady’s hilarious but highly literate satire of an ambitious boy from PEI.

University is Lawrence Campbell’s ticket out of the crushingly ordinary world he grew up in as son of a manager of a motel/mini-putt. He will overcome this, he believes, as a significant Canadian poet. It’s an ambition that seems in our day to border on the delusional. Mean Boy, however, is set in a fictional university in the ’70s, where Jim Arsenault—poet, working class hero, tenure track professor and hopeless drunk—is one of the rare Canadian men who’ve made it through the impenetrable walls of Canadian academia. Larry leaves PEI with the hope of sitting at Arsenault’s feet.

Coady wasn’t even born until the early ’70s. In town last weekend for Blue Metropolis, however, she explains: “It did make more sense to set it 30 years ago because of the fervour for creating Canadian literature that was going on then... I think anybody who really wants to be a poet or a writer is like Larry and goes through that period of pure enthrallment and it’s the be all and end all. And anyone who isn’t into writing can’t understand why you could be so obsessed with something so esoteric. I thought setting in the ’70s would give it a lot more credibility because Larry has encouragement in a way from the Zeitgeist of the time.”

While the core of Mean Boy is a satire of the romantic notions young writers have about literature and life, it’s not too esoteric to suggest that in a lot of ways Larry is a metaphor for Canada at the time. His youthful arrogance and sharp dismissive critiques are so obviously symptoms of an inferiority complex. “People were getting really pugnacious about Canadian identity and Canadian writers, which is really funny and really hard to fathom these days.”

But just as Larry still represents every writer who feels like a failure, Coady doesn’t mean to imply that Canadian self-hatred has disappeared from the map. “There are still a lot of self-hating Canadians,” she says, “particularly in the culture industry.” But setting Mean Boy in the ’70s gives Coady leeway to bypass the more complex, poseur politics one tends to find today. It also gives her a chance to pay attention to a beautiful, simple version of ambition that one is also less likely to find now.

Dermot Schofield is a slightly more successful and far more humble foil to Arsenault. If writers in the ’70s were more comfortable admitting to ambition, they also seemed more comfortable with failure. Schofield visits the university just when Larry is at the peak of his miserable realization that Arsenault is not quite the bastion of authenticity he seems. He gives Larry a glimpse of the rare lovely egolessness of Canadian low self-esteem in its purest form.

Schofield reminds Larry and will remind readers that anyone who truly loves writing is always going to feel like an idiot, no matter how successful they become. Anyone lucky enough to have seen Derek Walcott interviewed at Blue Met by Eleanor Wachtel heard an echo of this. A large part of the writer’s mission, Walcott argued, is to be the voice of failure, something as true for Nobel Prize-winning poets, great Canadian satirists or beginning writers.

Mean Boy by Lynn Coady, Doubleday, hc, 382pp, $29.95