by JULIET WATERS

Trevor Cole first hit the Canadian and international literary scene with Norman Bray, In the Performance of His Life, a dark comedy that became a finalist for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin award. Norman, the central character of his first novel, is an extreme narcissist and a terrible parental figure for a misguided young girl. In Fearsome Particles, Cole’s second novel, he introduces us to parents who are also failing, but for opposite reasons.

Gerald Woodlore is the COO of a floundering company that specializes in window screens and aspires to lead the market in vacuum filters. Vicki Woodlore is a real estate fluffer, or as she prefers to call herself, a “stager,” who specializes in making newly built luxury homes look lived in. While she may be great at marketing the illusion of happy, affluent family life, she has not been as successful at selling this to her son, Kyle. So oppressive is their hyper-controlled daily life that Kyle sees his escape in signing up as a civilian worker on a military base in Afghanistan.

Over beer and mouhamara in the Middle Eastern/Quebecois bistro le Petit Alep, Cole tells me that one of his favourite passages is the illustration Kyle gives of his home life. The Woodlore home is a place where nervous expectation is so pervasive that the most important issue of every day is whether or not Kyle has eaten the yogurt Vicki sets out for him every morning. “That was just my mornings, okay?” Kyle recalls “So from that, maybe you can figure out what my lunches and dinners were like, and the expectations around my school marks, and my career choices and my driving habits, and my sleeping patterns, and my clothing decisions, and my friends. And maybe it won’t seem quite so weird that I’d prefer spending a year in a dry-as-dirt, hot-as-hell military camp in Afghanistan surrounded by uncleared minefields and angry private militias to living in a luxury five-bedroom home on a street lined with big trees and SUVs.”

Though Fearsome Particles may not seem an obvious sequel to Norman Bray, Cole’s intention when he started his second novel was to explore the character of a parent who was the child of a narcissist. A parent a bit like Cole.

“Norman Bray was based on my own dad, who was a narcissist and an alcoholic. Gerald is kind of the product of somebody like Norman, someone like me, who has developed habits having to do with control. I tuck my sheets in and I’m pretty buttoned down in that way. And that’s because my father was so unpredictable and so willing to just explode or let himself go in whatever direction seemed right to him, but that made no sense to anyone else.”

The tragic irony is that Kyle, though not fundamentally a narcissist, has suddenly developed the character traits Gerald fears most. Sent home under mysterious circumstances and traumatized by whatever it is that happened in Afghanistan, Kyle has become damaged, cynical, angry and irrational. His post-traumatic stress syndrome is severe enough that Gerald and Vicki have no choice but to accept him as he is, an impossible flaw in their world.

If this sounds depressing, it is and it isn’t. There’s enough of Cole’s trademark tragi-comedy to steer the reader through some pretty brutal emotional terrain, and the often-mundane life of control freaks. The humour shines through in scenes of corporate soullessness reminiscent of The Office, and in the character of Rumsfeld, a psychopathic foster cat who has Gerald quite literally by the balls.

Even if the novel started out as an exploration of Gerald’s character, however, Cole’s most memorable creation here is Kyle. His cynical, sad voice rings the truest. Which in the end, goes to show that like most good parents, most good novelists are probably at their best when they open themselves up to those characters who challenge their most cherished intentions.

Fearsome Particles by Trevor Cole. M&S, hc. 342 pp. $32.99