Looking Good

Joseph Jones is librarian emeritus at the University of British Columbia
Library. He is the author of Reference Sources for Canadian Literary
Studies.

This last novel in a coming-of-age quartet centred on John Dupre
situates itself in a chaotic moment of American history. While events
erupt in the background, a set of characters living in Boston senses an
imminent revolution that never arrives. Most of the novel’s action
gets sandwiched between the October 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago
(a violent Weatherman rampage) and the widespread May 1970 campus
upheavals generated by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of
college students at Kent State University. Rarely does the history
obtrude.

Like an ellipse, the characters organize socially around two foci: a
politics manifested in underground newspapers and a sensibility
connected with dealing and using all sorts of drugs. Making up the main
cast are Vietnam veteran Tom Parker, dropout Cassandra Markapolous,
underground draft resister John Dupre, and his soulmate theoretician Pam
Zalman. An unusual narrative split between first-person for Tom and
third-person for John succeeds in intensifying immediacy, but never
stops jarring the reader with the shifts.

Beyond left-wing factionalism and a mind-bending pharmacopoeia, the
personal intersects with the social in relations between the sexes. The
earlier stages of the women’s liberation movement resonate in the
lives of individual characters. Maillard takes the fiction well beyond
this territory, into his signature exploration of gender. Androgyny
becomes a particularly prominent facet of a complex mysticism that
extends to oriental religion, the physiology of fasting, the poetry of
Rilke, sexual transcendence, and weird drug trips.

Rich thematic concerns could easily have overwhelmed narrative impetus,
but they have been kept under control. Characters live through events,
and their actions propel the reader forward. Story matters, and it has a
shape. Scattered inklings of John’s life in Canada from 1965 to 1968
do not add up well, but few readers are likely to notice. Looking Good
stands easily as a novel on its own, apart from the quartet. (In the
case of the development of the character of Cassandra, perhaps better
so.) Deeply infused with the language of the period, the musician’s
ear almost always gets syntax and diction right. This may be the
novel’s most remarkable feat.