The Hindmost

Geoff Hamilton is a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

By day, oddball Dwayne Feller devours junk food in the barricaded
basement of his mother’s house, deigning to communicate with the
troublesome woman only by phone. By night, Dwayne bombs at the local
comedy club, oblivious to the defects of his act. The plot thickens with
the appearance of Monigan, Dwayne’s long-lost, boozing father; Katlyn,
a saintly bartender; Sturgis, a slimy, scheming club owner; and sundry
others.

The hero of this comic novel, set in Toronto’s Cabbagetown district,
is a brainier version of Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s film The
King of Comedy (1983), right down to the loony mother yelling from
upstairs while her son pursues a doomed, masturbatory quest for fame.
Kennedy paints in brighter tones, however, ignoring the grimmer, grimier
realities of his struggling characters’ lives. Monigan, for instance,
has abandoned his family, succumbed to alcoholism, and sunk to accepting
jobs as a mob heavy, but he remains a lovable rascal, at worst a little
sad and pitiful. When the 250 pages are up, father and son are reunited,
and Dwayne has won the infinitely kind-hearted Katlyn, who inspires him
to a modicum of professional success.

While the dialogue tends to drag, and the author’s self-consciousness
with vocabulary can grate, as a whole this novel reads rather well.
There are, indeed, several lively comic sequences, such as that in which
Dwayne and Katlyn make awkward love: “She plucked Dwayne’s glass
from his hand and dropped it on the floor. He slid sideways until he was
lost in greenery. On the left, he was being scratched by the ficus; on
the right, a hanging plant’s secretions were mingling with his sweat
and running into the collar of his tunic; and from dead ahead advanced
the carnivore his beloved had become.”

Such moments are not enough, however, to produce anything really
memorable. A less sentimental eye—one more willing to keep Dwayne and
Monigan on the hook for their vanities—could have made this story as
compelling as its cinematic predecessor.