Todd Babiak
Toby Menard, née Tobias Mushinsky, having left behind both name and neighbourhood - the Montreal suburb of Dollard des Ormeaux - has it all. A great downtown condo, a stunning girlfriend, his face on billboards and an expensive car. He's the host of his own television show, on which he teaches the great unwashed which fork to use, how to shake hands, what makes a good suit. You know, the important stuff.
Naturally, it all comes apart. The show is called Toby: A Gentleman, while, pointedly, the book is Toby: A Man. And indeed it is the bildungsroman of an aging bachelor. On the eve of a federal election, Toby gets hammered with his cronies and then drives to his parents' home on the insistence of his worried mother. His father's been acting strangely. Toby finds his father in the driveway at the wheel of his burning car. While dragging the potential suicide away from the car, Toby worries about his shoes and his suit.
Still reeling from the alcohol, Toby leaves his mother and father at the emergency room. He's going to be interviewing a local candidate for the next day's election coverage, and needs his rest. But sleep never comes, so he drives to Westmount and the mansion in which his girlfriend lives. There he discovers she's cheating on him with his boss, the station manager. By the time he's live on air with the candidate, he's so disoriented he makes the mistake that costs him his career: racist remarks. He's fired, the girlfriend dumps him, he's forced to sell his condo and give up his BMW, and moves back into his parents' home.
He makes some desperate attempts to get work at other stations, but no one will hire him. And then he makes another mistake: He has a one-night stand with an unstable single mother. Later, she leaves her two-year-old son with him for what he thinks is an afternoon, but she disappears. Then he's conscripted to work in his parents' hot-dog restaurant, boy in tow.
Through all of this, Toby encounters once more the friends and neighbours of his earlier life, all of whom have chosen to remain in Dollard, even if they've attained the means to leave. Everyone rallies around, maintaining loyalties, and Toby comes to accept his surprising affection for the boy, for whom he's begun adoption proceeding. He goes so far as to re-unite the boy's mother with her estranged parents. Toby the gentleman has become Toby the man.
Despite the novel's simplistic morality and conventionally happy ending, Babiak's firm, eloquent narrative style and keen ear for natural dialogue ensure the swift and sure flow of the story. There are many moving moments, and the book is lightened with humour, particularly in the character of the television tycoon who becomes Toby's mentor. The story grips away and never falters, and the Montreal setting is fully evoked and used to excellent effect.
But an unattractive aspect of the novel is the sheer nastiness of the female characters. Toby's girlfriend is a backstabbing hypocrite who is sleeping her way to the top and who humiliates him in front of her friends. His mother, though she has some sympathetic scenes, is a selfish nag who clearly thinks little of her son's ambitions. And the little boy's mother abandons him with a stranger to pursue an obvious fantasy.
All the sympathetic characters, and all those with something to offer Toby, are men. Babiak's talent and skill are large, but in the end, this book is not.
Michel Basilières is the author of Black Bird. He teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.