Author Comeau grows up, trades quirky for real, in best effort yet
In Malagash, Joey Comeau may have written his best book yet. But he’s done so by writing against his own tendencies — signalling what might be a welcome maturation.
Malagash is narrated by a teenage girl named Sunday. Her dad is dying of cancer. She, her brother and mother have shipped out to Malagash, N.S., to be with him for his last days (he’s chosen to die close to his own mom). Underlying this is Sunday’s plan to record everything he says, upload the audio files to her computer, and transform them into a benign virus. To Sunday, infecting hard-drives with her dad’s final words will give him a kind of ghostly, electronic afterlife.
Comeau writes books for both kids and adults. But even works for older readers are charged with a YA energy — quirky dialogue and sitcom-ready kids, all sass and precocity.
Here, the impulse returns. An advanced whiz with computers, Sunday sounds like an ironic adult playing a teen, calling her brother “the waif,” herself “the wailing god of petulance,” and coding as “a type of poetry for the sort of people poetry never wanted.” Of course, her mom’s a toughcookie programmer who rarely hugs her kids; her dad’s a whimsical goofball who makes light of his death with jokes such as “chickens are idiot eagles and I hate them.” You either laugh at this stuff or you cringe.
Thankfully, Comeau clamps down on the quirkiness to allow more graceful images, scenes and dialogue to blossom, meaning Malagash rings with authentic emotion. Sunday knows she can’t save her dad. A meditative acceptance of life’s finality — the ability to “watch herself from the outside” — grows to check her frustration. A sagging house in an empty field is likened to a dying elephant: a shape that “doesn’t struggle . . . in the face of inevitability.” The image is full of quiet grace — of peace. Her father offers Zenlike koans to help her cope: “A leaf will fall,” he says. “A weight will lift.”
And Sunday’s surreptitious recordings of private farewells between her dad and other relations are genuinely affecting. “Goodbye forever,” they say to one another each night — a recording played “over and over again” until “it doesn’t mean anything.”
It’s not hard to be sad, watching a family in mourning. But by focusing on the hard stuff and easing off the quirk, Comeau gives readers a spare novella that feels real when it counts. Spencer Gordon is the author of the short story collection Cosmo ( Coach House Books, 2012) and the poetry collection Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions, 2017).