An interview with Kevin Canty, discussing his book Into the Great Wide Open
Published August 16th, 1996,
in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine
Even the Losers
Into the Great Wide Open Explores Teen Life
By Kevin Canty
Doubleday, $21.95
As a consequence, the last decade
has seen a glut of novels and memoirs dealing with the subject. Some are good;
a few are great: Tom Perrotta’s Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies and
Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, to mention two. Short story writer and
novelist Kevin Canty adds to this growing field, bringing a valuable new voice.
His first story collection, A
Stranger in this World, features some of the most memorable and, at times,
disturbing views of modern adolescence. In the story “Blue Boy,” the main
character, a lifeguard named Kenny, almost allows a boy to drown because he’s
too stoned to notice. Another character, Paul from “Pretty Judy,” finds himself
seducing an attractive retarded woman, not knowing whether his actions are
right or wrong.
“I guess if I had one subject
that overrides a lot of these [stories],” Canty said in an interview during his
book-tour stop in Minneapolis, “it would be identity—looking for an identity.
‘Who am I? How do I put a self together?’ And once you’ve constructed yourself,
you do something that your constructed self can’t recognize. How do you
assimilate that? ‘I’m a good person; I’m not that kind of person.’ And yet you
did that; and yet you caused that. What do you do when you don’t know yourself
anymore? Those are the moments I’m really interested in.”
Canty’s characters constantly
redefine themselves because of changing situations. The main character of
Canty’s new novel, Into the Great Wide Open, is a revised version of the
Kenny in “Blue Boy,” and he struggles to adapt himself to his problematic
seventeen-year-old mind and body.
Jaded, overly analytical, and way
too cool for words, Kenny plays a kind of stoned Holden Caulfield. At the
novel’s start, he meets Junie on a “Liberal Religious Youth” weekend retreat
that their parents have forced them to attend. The two quickly pair off, and
during the next nine months they become each other’s repository for pain,
jealousy, and, sometimes, love.
If all this sounds too familiar,
well, that’s the point. Canty hits all the hot spots: teen sexuality, familial
neglect, alcoholism, suicide attempts, and, of course, pregnancy. But Canty
treats these subjects with a rare insight—and sense of humor—achieving a level
of immediacy that jars the reader into recognition.
Written in the third person—but
limited to Kenny’s field of vision—Into the Great Wide Open explores
adolescent self-perceptions and the ways in which teens reconcile this vision
with their skewed worldview. The novel follows Kenny’s thought processes, going
into his mind to record his observations, which are often faulty.
“A lot of times these things
happen,” Canty says, “and [Kenny] doesn’t see it. There’s this delayed decoding,
where he’ll only figure out later, ‘Oh, that’s what was really going on.’ In my
life, often, the important things happen, and I don’t really realize it at the
time. It’s only later, in some kind of retrospect [that things make sense]. But
Kenny’s so jammed up in terms of experience—a lot of times he’s really running
on instinct. He doesn’t quite know why he’s doing things, and he keeps making
judgments about himself, and about half of them are wrong.”
But Kenny keeps trying, sounding
out different versions of his imagined self in his head. He goes through
several drafts of each observation, and Canty uses intricate and often
hilarious wordplay to record these thoughts. As Kenny struggles to find the words,
he gets nearer to his own truths and to his own identity.
“I guess I believe in language as
a means of controlling the world,” Canty says. “Whether you’re a writer or a
cement block salesman, finding a word that’s adequate to your situation—finding
out, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s what I am’ or ‘That’s what this is’—is a really
fascinating process.”
This attempt at self-mastery
through language recalls James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Man. The wordplay, the excursions into the character’s consciousness, and
Kenny’s megalomania all resemble Joyce’s treatment of the young Stephen
Dedalus. But unlike Stephen, Kenny is not based on the author’s own younger
self.
“I don’t think he’s
autobiographical,” Canty says. “You take snippets of your own life. You have
to, because this is the only experience of being a human being that I’m ever
going to have. So you’ve got to base it somewhere. And a lot of the furniture
of adolescent life in [the novel] is similar to my own high school catastrophe.
… I dropped out of high school. I was kind of a disreputable jerk. But he’s
really a made-up character. … It’s all just lies.”
Canty ends the novel on an odd
note, leaving Kenny in a situation that’s as ambiguous as it is final. The
question looms for the reader: What will Kenny do with his life? With Kenny’s
gift for words, the most obvious future for him would be as a writer, but Canty
was reluctant to give such an easy answer.
“I don’t know,” Canty says. “In
some sense, I’ve deliberately left his world past the end of the book
unexplored…. This wordplay makes me think he’s somebody who could be engaged by
[writing], but I kind of left his future up for grabs.”
—David Wiley
