A rough diamond as big as Fitzgerald?

Colin McAdam

Jonathan Cape, 12.99

LACKING ambition or challenged on technical know-how, first novels come at us chasing their learning curves, prototypical, signature scribbles more shaky than curved, more told than telling. There are exceptions, though. The greatest sit on pinnacles, far beyond the common trajectory of ascent. Brian Moore’s Judith Hearne, Amos Oz’s My Michael and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim are examples. Colin McAdam joins their ranks.

Some Great Thing portends in its title the critic’s verdict. It is precociously accomplished, wise, deeply moving and, deservedly, has been bracketed with the work of F Scott Fitzgerald, though there are also echoes of Malamud, William Kennedy and Nabokov. Out of the pages fly the throaty, rasping confessions of Jerry McGuinty, an Ottawa builder who made his name in the 1970s, interspersed with the velvet poetics of Simon Struthers, a rich boy falling into gracelessness. Here and there, is a quasi-postmodern ghost, a mischievous whisper that is the author’s intruding voice.

It appears so unpromising, this terrain of urban planning as directed by Simon Struthers, whose life in the bitchiness of office politics is conveyed as a series of conquests of women colleagues and spats with his seniors. Nor is the building-site world of McGuinty, pierced by accounts of domestic sorrows as Kathleen his wife submits to booze, a more rousing subject. Beyond the smallness of their existence, the height of Kathleen’s accruing terrors, and the birth of Jerry junior - a doted-on parcel of "flesh and wrinkles... screaming in purple dribbling rage" - there is no suspense and little to shock.

The novel’s achievement lies in the depth of McAdam’s probing into the depths of his characters’ foibles, the slow implosion of their lives creating darkness while somehow their slippage brings them towards light. Kathleen runs; Jerry junior grows up and leaves home without a word, embracing the world of down-and-outs. Big Jerry, now bereft, abandons his building concerns to pursue his son and woo him home.

Meanwhile, Simon is losing his looks, his charm, his potency as a beau. Both men harbour dreams, and in pursuit of their desires, their fates interact.

The writing is perfectly pitched. Jerry’s voice, so powerfully amplified and intense that it lives in the ear, competes with Struthers’ unfolding chronicle - a more distant, third-person telling which makes him the novel’s junior partner in terms of psychological clout and emotional sap. But both are fiercely, intractably real. McAdam’s control of his material feels complete - we have the tiny telling detail that dots the big picture, as each man’s ambition to corner the same patch of city green belt reaches a sweetly ironic climax.

Add to this a dazzling sense of Quebec in stasis and you have a book of daring amplitude and depth. Some minor characters are elusive - Kwyet, the female teenage object of Struther’s desire is rightly, deliberately, so. Yet Some Great Thing is a dazzling down-payment on posterity; the appearance of a talent (Scott Fitzgerald notwithstanding) as big as the diamond that dwarfed the Ritz.