Book Review : An Angry Man Amid a Morose Crowd

My Present Age by Guy Vanderhaeghe (Ticknor & Fields: $15.95)

A bashed-up jalopy is clearly the thing to have when trying to bull your way through a traffic jam of sleek new Chryslers and BMWs. Freedom, the song goes, is just another word for nothing left to lose.

The same kind of edge is held by the narrator-slob. There he lies supine at novel’s center, drinking, jobless, snubbed, falling over the furniture, making passes at the wrong people, while the glossier successes swim uneasily around him, their water clouded by his mud.

“Love me, reader,” narrator-slob mouths, from under the table, his witticism scattered around him. “Love me.”

Well, the reader does or doesn’t. In the case of Ed, protagonist of “My Present Age,” enough well-placed Canadian readers have been taken with him to win the book a critical success. The author, Guy Vanderhaeghe, received the Governor General’s Award for a previous book of short stories, two of which contain Ed.

He is fat and indolent. He eats and drinks lavishly and, through a display of Gargantuan temperament, had managed to win a neat, pretty, determined and outgoing wife, Victoria. By the start of “My Present Age,” she has left him to pursue the hope of a more manageable life. He has made fitful efforts to get her back--at one point locking himself into her bathroom--but she holds him off, files for divorce, and takes up with one of the BMW types, an ambitious academic.

Ed teaches creative writing to an adult education class, but lives mostly on the proceeds of a cashed-in life insurance policy that his father gave him. He divides his time between apathy and fighting battles he programs himself to lose.

One of these is with his downstairs neighbor, a crotchety old man who appropriates his parking place and denounces him on a local radio talk-show as a welfare sponger. One of the book’s better scenes is a floor-and-ceiling duel that starts off with pounding broomsticks and escalates to the point where Ed slams a shot-put ball on his floor at the successive points where he judges his antagonist to be lurking.

Another battle is with his wife’s lawyer, whom he harasses in an attempt to get back a set of Balzac he had given her. A third is with Victoria’s pompous lover. Invariably, in getting the worst of these encounters, Ed conceives himself to have won a portion of moral victory.

Amid duels and unhappy flashbacks, the book’s main action comes after Victoria invites Ed to lunch, hints that she’s in trouble--her lover wants her to get an abortion--and then flees, put off by his flippant discursiveness. Stung, he sets out to find her. She has holed up somewhere in the city and he goes from motel to motel, driven by one of his writing students. When found, it turns out that she does not want his offer of a once-more-reformed Ed.

Apart from this, there is a procession of Ed’s internal musings and remorses. When young, he and Victoria were part of a generational clan of nonconformists. Most have moved on, though not very likeably. One friend, a radical, has become a fundamentalist preacher. Victoria’s lawyer, once a Bohemian roisterer, is now intent on getting rich.

Rejection is no longer the thing. The fun has gone out of it; but Ed is beached. He scrawls away at a Western about a cool-handed lawman, and dreams of himself as a kind of Huck Finn seeking a Jim to take care of him.

The hero-slob is a hoary character by now, and Ed’s shambling outrageousness is highly familiar. The author, to his credit, seems to realize it. But Vanderhaeghe never manages to extricate him from his rut. The book is not appealing enough nor touching enough to lift Ed out of the overpopulated fictional tradition he travels in. He is one more Angry Man, no longer young, amid a morose crowd.