antagonistNot every story follows a killer on the lam or a treasure hunt. Not every plot details, in page-turning fashion, the story of an island-marooned group of strangers looking to find civilization.

Some stories are about characters. Relationships between sons and fathers, mothers and sons, friends, the past and the future.

The Antagonist by Lynn Coady is one of those books. Nothing particularly Earth-shattering happens (at least, not in the present tense of the story), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in my mind.

Our story’s protagonist, a 40-year old Gordon Rankin (known as Rank) with quite the past, has discovered that he is a character in a college buddy’s debut novel. Angered by his representation, feeling like his story was taken without permission, Rank decides to e-mail Adam to voice his frustrations. While he started out the one-way conversation as a vent session, Rank soon realizes he needs to tell his own story. Adam isn’t exactly an active participant in the e-mail chain, but that doesn’t stop Rank from serving as narrator to his own life, to the things that Adam either missed or simply didn’t include.

And as he goes along filling in these blanks, telling his side, we (yes, I’m including you) start to learn more and more about what made the man we were introduced to in such a rough fashion. Before the first e-mail to Adam has finished, Rank has already told him he “doesn’t need his goddamned help” and calling him chubby and pompous.

Yet and still, Rank doesn’t rub you the wrong way. The relationship with his father, strained as it was and is, develops in such a way that it’s difficult not to find yourself rooting for each side. There’s his last serious ex-girlfriend and the time he thought he found God or the time he almost killed a guy while serving as makeshift security outside his father’s ice cream parlor. There’s also his three friends from college and what happened over his final days at school, over 20 years ago. Or the relationship with his late mother or the love/hate affair with the game of hockey and its effect on his life.

These and many other stories unfold throughout the novel as Coady (writing often with the incredibly sharp, intuitively accurate tongues of college males) adeptly cobbles together a story in reverse. And frankly, it’s a risky strategy. Now, as you can tell because I clearly enjoyed the book and I’m writing about it now, it paid off. But, the risk is that you as reader are going to be hooked enough by Gordon Rankin’s anger and situation to want to find out more about how he got here.

The beginning of the book might test you a little bit, but here’s my advice: stick around to find out.