Sentence for sentence, Lynn Coady is one of the most dynamic prose stylists in Canadian letters. While her catalogue of characters includes a teen mom (Strange Heaven), a sheepish adolescent (Saints of Big Harbour), and a boozy, pompous poet (Mean Boy), her narrative voice typically embodies a mixture of winking machismo and world-weary humour. Take this description from her newest book, The Antagonist, in which she sketches out the seamy lair of a small-town drug dealer: “A lot of red light bulbs, a lot of smoke, a lot of heavy metal odds and sods (skull candles, flying-V ashtrays — you get the picture). The guitar in the corner, the amps, the preposterous stereo system, so tweaked and extravagant it might as well have been sculpted from solid testosterone.”

This brooding novel is the first-person confession of a hulking man-child named Gordon “Rank” Rankin, infamous in his youth for his violent outbursts in small-town parking lots and at minor-league hockey rinks. The adult Rank is a veritable reservoir of resentment, owing to the untimely death of his mother; the imprecations of his pigheaded father; and the hubris of his former college roommate, Adam, a budding writer who impugned Rank by depicting his troubled family in a bestselling novel. Structured as a series of emails to Adam, Rank’s book-length rant is meant as a corrective to his reputation as a brainless brute.

Witnessing the man as he defends his life is thoroughly engaging; Rank evolves from a terse, somewhat reluctant diarist to an impassioned memoirist. As well as enabling him to convey his latent intelligence, committing words to paper forces him to confront some of his darker chapters. Coady’s narrative energy rarely flags, but Rank’s writing often feels a little too rococo, less like the work of an amateur scribe and more like the elegant musings of a literary craftsman (i.e., Coady herself). Despite these lapses in authenticity, Coady has created a troubled, wholly fascinating figure: a warrior fighting to clear his name.