Fiction Review

Kaitlyn Pinder

You Comma Idiot
by Doug Harris
Frederiction, NB: Gooselane, 2010
330 pp. $29.95

          Lee Goodstone, the ‘You’ in Doug Harris’s You Comma Idiot, is a type of guy. In Lee’s character, Harris develops a type of masculinity particular to the twenty-first century’s slacker class in which men spend their time getting high and drunk, playing sports, fighting and chasing girls. Lee is captain of the slacker class, especially because he holds virtually no power, not even in his small group of friends – that power goes to his much more charming and better looking best friend, Johnny.  And yet, the exemplar slacker is neither stupid nor naïve –  “You believe that knowing all this, that being burdened with this much vision, is paralyzing, that it would paralyze anyone, and so it’s not your fault if you’ve never really done anything in your life” (11).  This new type of masculine identity has its roots in the modernist pensive subject; but, instead of mourning the paralysis of self-awareness, the slacker makes an excuse of it. Finally, the characters in Harris’s novel make up a special sect of slackers – the Montreal Anglos. Lee belongs to the community of Anglos native to the island who have nonetheless refused to learn French: “The unstated goal of everyone here is to slide through life doing as little as possible. If not, they’d already be in Toronto. Maybe it’s a displaced anglo thing. The choice to live life in English within a French city” (157-58). Importantly, Lee and his friends are not transient Anglos, but Montreal lifers, admittedly too lazy and disinterested to learn the language of their city. Lee makes excuses for himself; he is a pathetic narcissist (and is thus a charming protagonist). Lee Goodstone is the captain of slackers – the idiot.

            Harris’s novel follows Lee through a summer of crisis: his friend, Henry, is accused of kidnapping and suspected of murder; Lee sleeps with Johnny’s beautiful girlfriend, Honey; and Cuz moves in on Lee’s dealing territory. The consequences of these crises threaten the years of friendship that have reinforced and guaranteed the idyllic stupor of their unmotivated lives, threatening Lee, Johnny, and Henry to take on active roles in world around them. The novel is narrated in the second person and Lee is the referent of the ubiquitous ‘You.’ The blatant masculinity of Lee’s problems (“You’re the kind of guy who still thinks about the pretty girls you were afraid of in high school” [7]) articulated through the narrative subject pronoun ‘You’ places the female reader in a strange place of gendered interpellation. More than offering the interior thoughts of a male character through first person or stream of conscious narration, which imply at least a minimum of reader identification, the second person narration is strangely authoritative, demanding identification with the statements the narrator makes.
            “When a pretty girl laughs tells a funny story and everyone laughs,” the narrator explains, “that’s you in the everyone part. A voice that matters only in that it rounds out the chorus” (8). Lee is indeed the rounding out of all the male characters in the novel. As he adjusts to the new demands life is making on him, he occupies, however unstably, different iterations of masculine identity represented by his friends. When he manages to steal Honey from Johnny, he is the type of guy who can get the prettiest girl; he is “not an idiot” (148). When all his plans fall apart and he is under investigation for selling drugs, he is a naïve outcast abandoned by his friends as Henry is when he is accused of kidnapping. Similarly, when he finally has to assert himself physically in his defense against Cuz, he must take on Cuz’s own machismo. And finally, when he is forced to take on the responsibilities he has too long avoided, he becomes a sacrificial father not unlike his friend Aaron. In his portrayal of Lee’s negotiations of these masculine iterations, Harris provides a study of the slacker type. At once idiot, prince, fool, fighter, and father the slacker struggles to do as little as possible, all the while under the pressures of society, here represented by the female characters, to do just a little bit more.
            Harris’s novel is often funny and at times offers unexpected insights and images. For the most part, it is a careful and witty examination of masculine potentialities in the slacker class. Unfortunately, the ending of the novel deflates the insights the novel had been building up. Although meant to be a moving and poignant testament to the silent strength of male friendship, the ending digresses into a stereotype of Canadian masculinity, the hockey fight. If not for the last words, “No, really” (325), a further deflation of one of the most successful jokes running through the novel, one would assume Harris was kidding.