Identity Crisis

John Colapinto’s debut novel About the Author suffers from one major problem. I don’t like the author.

Not Colapinto—I know nothing about him—but Cal Cunningham, the metafictional author of the book. The author of About the Author, that is, not about Almost Like Suicide, which the character purports to have written but really didn’t…it’s complicated.

Cal Cunningham is a young man living in New York City. He likes women, and he likes glamour almost as much. He dreams of living the life of a famous novelist, but there’s one problem. He can’t seem to put so much as a few words down on paper. So he lives in a cramped apartment with Stewart Church, a law student who, to Cal, seems incredibly dull and lifeless.

That is, until Stewart shows Cal one of his short stories. The short stories he’s been writing without telling Cal. The novel, we learn, he’s written without telling Cal.

Stewart sets out for a class…and never comes back. He’s met his end in a crash involving his bicycle and a motor vehicle. The locked file cabinet in Stewart’s room proves far too tempting for the permanently blocked “writer” who lives in the room next door.

The novel is a labyrinth of fairly contrived plot twists and U-turns. It’s too difficult to summarize, and even by trying I’d strip it of any enjoyment it might hold. There was nothing inherently terrible about the book, and its narrative voice—Cal’s—is interesting. I simply couldn’t bring myself to like the main character. Some of the jacket copy, Thomas Mallon’s endorsement, says “John Colapinto…make[s] his nefarious hero, Cal Cunningham, a little more charming with each increase of his own bad behavior and desperation.”

He was never quite charming enough for me.