Some Great Thing [Paperback]

Colin McAdam (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2005

Jerry McGuinty is a simple, self-made builder who claims he can plaster a wall that will change your life. Simon Struthers is a disaffected businessman who proves the old adage about money and happiness. Together they face the new Ottawa of the seventies: brash, bright, and ready for the taking.

With their different careers and successes, these two strangers seek to carve out their own happiness-Jerry with his new wife, Simon with his endless affairs and intrigues. But love can be suffocated by the drive to succeed, and individuals crushed by greed and progress. Only when both men realize what they have to lose will their lives finally intersect and the story spiral to its astonishing conclusion

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Canadian writer Colin McAdam's Some Great Thing demonstrates much promise but shows a bit of the raggedness to be expected from an ambitious debut effort. McAdam spends nearly a quarter of the book slowly introducing his interpretation of Ottawa, experimenting with first- and third-person narration, and framing the lives of his two protagonists, Simon Struthers and Jerry McGuinty. McGuinty is an ambitious developer with a passion for plaster and for the lunch truck cook, Kathleen Herlihy. Struthers, a man crippled by the reputation of his famous father, is a civil servant in the National Capital Division. Only at the end of Part Two (of Six) do Struthers and McGuinty meet, and Part Three begins the real unfolding of the story. Some readers will have abandoned McAdam long before, during his explorations of the corrupt process for getting small business loans or in his fragmented presentation of Struthers's sexual appetites. They may also stumble over McAdam's occasional lapses into pseudo-poetry, placed in the mouths of working-class characters ("...I will tell you about a line like 'S' and the taste of the milk of lost hope.")

Yet, as McAdam moves forward, the work he has done early on establishing relationships and experimenting with form builds momentum. The ageing Struthers's sexual dalliances and his struggle to live up to the promise of the visionary Dreambook (a list of grand ideas prepared by one of the early city mandarins) lead him to seek distraction, inevitably, in a tragic passion for Kweyt Schutz, the daughter of one of his co-workers. Meanwhile, McGuinty's pursuit of "some great thing to do" manifests in sprawling suburbs, shopping malls, conflicts with Struthers over development plans, and a quest to build a relationship with his lost son.

McAdam's affinity for development and city planning makes perfect sense when considering the complexity of Some Great Thing. While it is far from perfect, there is great talent on display in the book, and McAdam's craftsman-like approach suggests he will only improve with each new construction. --Patrick O'Kelley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Urban planning and construction in Ottawa, Canada, might seem like dull subjects on which to build a novel, but in this compelling, bawdy debut, McAdam fashions them into powerful metaphors for the ambitions and personalities of two opposing characters, Jerry McGuinty and Simon Struthers. An introverted construction worker whose most reliable expression is "fuckin eh," McGuinty dreams of building better houses than the shoddy tract homes he's hired to plaster; eventually, he becomes one of the most powerful developers of suburban Ottawa. Struthers, on the other hand, is the master of the charming, vapid bureaucratic memo; the government's director of design and land use, he has a reputation for a smooth tongue in the office and among the ladies. Distracted by one love affair after another, Struthers feels age erode his promise until he becomes desperate to accomplish some great public works projectâ€"on the same piece of land where McGuinty is determined to build his most magnificent housing community yet. Fans of Martin Dressler will appreciate McAdam's attention to the mechanics of real estate development, but his forceful, cartwheeling prose style is more akin to that of Dermot Healy or Lawrence Sterne. His first-person narrators wink and hint at the reader, and he sometimes indulges in stream of consciousness or other formal play. Some of these sections have more flash than substanceâ€"the book's least successful bit is its first 20 pages. But McAdam redeems himself by fusing his housing narrative with a thoughtful exploration of the dynamics of home, where the relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, can often be more loving than those between husband and wife. Technical prowess and a surprising empathy mark McAdam as a writer to watch.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (April 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156032147
• ISBN-13: 978-0156032148
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,750,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For those interested in "New School" fiction..., March 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Some Great Thing (Hardcover)

"Some Great Thing" is a well-above average piece of writing and an absorbing story (at least the sections that involve Jerry). It far exceeds most debut fiction. The most compelling sections integrate the growing pains of rapidly expanding Ottawa in the 70's with the much more excruciating pain of a family breaking apart due to neglect and alcohol abuse. Listening (and that's fairly accurate given the narrative style) to Jerry, with his rough workday speech, describe his ascent from blue-collar plasterer to real estate empire-maker is mesmerizing. The hints of familial disaster that surface early in the book suggest something in sharp contrast to Jerry's sturdy construction projects. Ideas about the city, the neighborhood, Jerry's family, and Jerry himself are beautifully intertwined.

The other prominent storyline is not as memorable. Maybe it's just the subject matter - a self-absorbed, womanizing bureaucrat well practiced in the art of governmentspeak. We get no clear vision of Simon (he doesn't really have a clear idea of himself so maybe that's the point). His delusional obsession with Kwyet and his vacillations over the future of the park don't inspire the same passion as Jerry's singleminded drive to leave his mark on the world, at the expense of his family.
Overall, I would recommend this book for those who read regularly, particularly if you enjoy exploring "modern" narrative techniques and are willing to take a chance with a newly published writer.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Working Class Great Gatsby, April 10, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Some Great Thing (Hardcover)

This is simply one of the finest novels - first or fifth - to be published in the english language in many years. My friends from Canada have been raving about it and I'll admit I was skeptical as I approached (anything with that much advance hype tends to disappoint). But the book exceeds all expectations. It's a sensation in Canada for a reason: it's brilliant, utterly original and a brave braid of two completely different voices within a complicated, sophisticated story structure. At the center is Jerry - big hearted, powerful and ambitious. At his side is Cathleen - boozy, tragic and crazy (a gritty Daisy Buchanan). Their rise and fall - all told in dizzying prose - is the stuff of great literature. Colin McAdam is without a doubt one of the most talented writers on the planet today. After the prizes inevitably reign down on this book, McAdam will be a household name. I can't wait to see what he does next.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Dirt's the future, not the past. Change, move, use it.", April 10, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Some Great Thing (Hardcover)

The bull-dozing, digging, grading, and construction in Ottawa in the 1970s serve as metaphors for the ambitions and dreams of two men, whose parallel lives exist on completely different planes until they briefly intersect at the height of their careers. Jerry McGuinty, an up-by-the-bootstraps contractor comes from a family of plasterers, a man dedicated to giving good product for a good day's work. Simon Struthers, the wealthy son of one of the "Mandarins" of Ontario, on the other hand, is a powerful administrator in the National Capital Division, an independent division of government formed in 1899 to plan the land use within Canada's capital. While Jerry sees land as offering unlimited possibilities of houses, malls, and golf courses, Simon sees land as a resource to be conserved, not for the sake of conservation so much as to keep the demand high, his own power intact, and his importance enhanced.

Jerry's unpretentious and ungrammatical story alternates with that of Simon, and their paths cross when Jerry sets out to build a subdivision that will surround a golf course. As Jerry's business becomes almost totally hamstrung by the red tape at the Capital Division, his home problems intensify with his wife's alcoholism and infidelity, along with his son's alienation and resentment. Simon, unable to make any sort of commitment in his private life, also delays action on Jerry's permits.

McAdam has tried to make the construction industry an exciting subject for a novel by focusing on the emotionally limited characters in the story, rather than on the industry itself. Unfortunately, Simon Struthers, one of the main characters, is a cipher with whom the reader will develop little, if any, genuine connection, while Jerry McGuinty commands our full attention and emotional involvement. With the point of view alternating between Jerry and Simon, the author creates scenes reminiscent of one-act plays, often filled with humor and irony, and inspiring the reader's empathy with Jerry. Several scenes consist entirely of dialogue and are easy to imagine on stage, but these dialogues also remind the reader of the inanities with which we pepper our everyday conversations, and some readers may become impatient with this conversational "filler." Ultimately, the novel focuses on the idea of land as potential, a parallel for the goals and dreams of the characters, which for Jerry is "something big you can walk right past...your modest contribution to the bigness of the world." Mary Whipple