I thought The Coward was excellent. It is a tough read in places, but also funny, refreshingly honest and uplifting in places.
This is part memoir, part fiction (although I suspect more fiction than memoir); Jarred was a troubled, rebellious teenager whose mother has died and whose father is alcoholic. The book opens with him in his mid-20s, in hospital after a car accident which has left him permanently unable to walk and using a wheelchair. He phones his father, who is now sober, after a 10-year estrangement because he has no-one and nowhere else to go to. The book deals with Jarred’s coming to terms with disability, his shattered but possibly salvageable relationship with his father and his dealing with his own demons – which quite often make him a hard character to like.
It sounds unremittingly grim, but Jarred McGinnis writes extremely well, he structures the story very grippingly and injects enough wit and humour to make this an excellent read. He manages to avoid (and parody on occasion) the toxic positivity which seems to pervade so much discourse these days; being disabled, especially at first, can be emotionally and physically very tough and McGinnis shows both the personal aspects of this and the reactions of others to someone in a wheelchair, both good and bad. It’s clear-eyed and powerful but never self-pitying and nor is it a righteous polemic; it’s just a good story which also has important things to say about attitudes to disability, masculinity, resilience and the possibility of redemption – and what that may actually mean.
For me, The Coward was a very fine novel and a really good read which I can recommend very warmly.
(My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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