Cockroach
Rawi Hage
House of Anansi Press, 2008
305 pages, $29.95

What is a human being’s existence, exactly? Gristle and meat, with blood moving throughout? A series of decisions along a moral code? A set of delusions that sustain? The impact one makes on a place? On others? Or is it mere survival – fighting against mortal threats that can hide behind any corner?

Such are the existential questions asked – often directly – by the unnamed narrator in Rawi Hage’s latest novel, Cockroach. They are big and beefy and masturbatory questions, all quintessentially human in that they are self-aware and curious, products of the thoughts that surface when one changes homes, sees the world, fights against nature or lives penuriously, just as the narrator does.

They are also questions common to writers, and Rawi Hage is a born writer. Surely, as of late, he has not stopped analysing his own existence. Raised in Lebanon and Cyprus, he immigrated to Canada in 1991, via the States, and became a cab driver/art photographer in Montreal. He blasted onto the CanLit scene in 2006 with his much-lauded debut, Deniro’s Game – a novel plucked from the slush pile at House of Anansi that went on to be nominated for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award and Writer’s Trust Prize. It won none, but it did go on to score £100,000 for Hage when it took the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest English literary prize on the planet.

Hage’s remarkable story was manna from heaven for cultural journalists the world over, and one could wallpaper a small cathedral with the number of Q&As, profiles, reviews and photographs that preceded the release of Deniro’s Game. It was a bewildering response to a piece of Canadian writing, and though the praise it received may not have been entirely earned, this debut novel – and its promising author – offered a much-needed shot in the arm to the national literary scene. But as with most rushes, readers were quick to look for their next fix. The chattering classes briskly turned to soothsaying, predicting a rosy future of Hage, if only he could do it again.

And now, two years on, we have Cockroach.

Cockroach opens with a cliché. An unnamed protagonist recounts a session with his therapist, setting up the basic tenets of the book and his character. It is a tight piece of expositional writing. Readers know immediately that they are dealing with an untrustworthy man with a weakness for beautiful women; a man who thinks of himself quite literally as a cockroach; a man who steals; a man “consumed” by “the question of existence”; a man who recently failed at hanging himself, and is now mandated into therapy by the state. He is, in short, that thing that makes for great fiction: a man with interesting problems.

As readers follow the narrator through the snowy streets of Montreal, they learn more of what his existence entails. He is originally from a distant, hotter country (also without name) and he spends most of his days wandering, scheming and trying to score money. His reflections on everything – routine, justice, sex, winter, immigration, class – are sparked by what he observes, driven through the filter of his mania and his conviction that he is a bug. “Yes, I am poor,” he thinks, “I am vermin, a bug, I am at the bottom of the scale. But I still exist.”

The narrative meanders along with the protagonist for quite some time, both dealing with small, immediate obstacles (the bumming of cigarettes, the getting of a job, flirt sessions) and enormous, philosophical ponderings (“I was split between two planes and aware of two existences, and they were both mine”). Other characters, mostly immigrants as well, are introduced in jolts with histories that provide some of the few scraps of story in the front half of the book. A gay man recounts his tale of persecution in his native Persia, a hypocritical “professor” is defined by a long-ago love affair, and a musician (also Persian) is revealed to be a petty self-lover who uses his swarthy foreigner status to seduce women.

Punctuating these bursts and ramblings are episodes from the narrator’s own life, before and after he moved to Montreal. Mostly told during perfunctory therapy sessions, his story concerns the moral quandaries he faced growing up under an unforgiving political dictatorship. Towards the end of his time in this foreign land, his sister’s hyper-sexuality (which seems to run in the family) and yearning for freedom leads the narrator to a key ethical decision that will shape the rest of his life.

Delivered quite late along, this piece of information coincides with the development of a plot in Montreal, in the present: an opportunity to get revenge on behalf of the narrator’s sometimes-girlfriend, the beautiful Shohreh. It is at this moment that all the loose ends of the novel – heretofore random and inexplicably scattered – start to be braided together; the writing finally gains narrative purchase and intensifies to a grand finish.

The sophomore novel is as curious a thing as a cockroach, especially when it follows a successful debut. The expectations placed on authors to make lightning strike twice have reached mythical, stupid proportions. Remember the ballyhoo surrounding The Autograph Man? Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? You Shall Know Our Velocity? Shampoo Planet? These are all books that were markedly more strident and ambitious than their predecessors. They read as though the authors had staked a claim in Book One, and were determined to drive their flag in deeper in Book Two. Most examples are venerable failures that could have been titled I am not a One-Trick Pony; their writers were purposely, consciously trying to tap into the universal but did so at the expense of the celebrated immediacy of their debut.

Perhaps, then, a sophomore novel is nothing like a cockroach. But it is very similar to Cockroach. This is a novel that oozes ambition in every line, framing every observation and event with big-picture existentialist buffers. Nary a moment goes by without the narrator (and the reader) asking how it plugs into a larger philosophy about the meaning of life. When the anti-hero collects some spare change from a friend, for example, it prompts a reflection on suicide: “The void cannot be experienced . . . it is either a perpetual existence or nothingness, my friend.”

The titular metaphor is also aggressively pursued, as the narrator constantly tries to convince himself that he is an insect. Hage is admirably determined to explore every aspect of his symbol. Roaches, after all, are loathed and ubiquitous, and in discussing them – “only cockroaches shall survive to rule the earth” – he explicitly courts universality. Everywhere has an underground; everywhere has vermin and lowlifes. But, as with most sophomore novels, this strenuous effort ends out biting the author in the ass. So much attention is called to the roach delusion and its implications that it ends out as a device: overexposed and annoying. The same can be said for Hage’s withholding of names and his over-reliance on therapy sessions that unearth the narrator’s backstory.

Yet, despite Cockroach’s adherence to the sophomore novel pattern, there is much to admire in it. In many ways, its literary fireworks are trumped by solid nuts-and-bolts character writing. The bug trope may conjure Kafka, but the authors Hage is closest to channelling are Camus and Céline. This is a deeply personal book – a character study, not an extended metaphor – in which the priority is to get closer and closer to the narrator, strip him of delusions, unpack his history, and tear into him so that readers can see his guts. Hage does the same for Montreal, abandoning the old Richler-MacLennan themes of Quebec’s political tension, Habs games and faded glory in order to expose the day-to-day mess of the city. Accents are more interesting than languages, and ethics are more important than laws. Even history is handled differently: Hage’s flashbacks show how foreign events are left to play out in Canada, rather than examine the predictable competing narratives of French and English, Catholic and Protestant, separatist and federalist.

Cockroach depicts a Montreal unfamiliar to most Montrealers and a Canada unfamiliar to most Canadians. The tidal wave of reviews has declared that the novel describes “the immigrant experience,” but, while it does offer the point of view of an immigrant, to say that this book is devoted to such a theme is to give it short shrift. Hage has gone to amazing lengths to shape a character whose complex mentality and functional delusion provide all of the tension in a novel largely absent of plot. The experience of this specific immigrant plays into the larger preoccupations of the novel – that when one’s lines of truth are cut, finding ethical guidance can be mentally unbalancing, and one questions the value of his own existence. “Here in this Northern land,” observes the narrator at the beginning of Cockroach, “no one gives you an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across the balcony, to curse your neighbours’ mothers and threaten their kids.” Immigration is not the subject of this book but, rather, one of the many factors that has created its disconnected – but oddly sympathetic – protagonist.

It is the narrator’s disconnection that leads to one of the greatest aspects of Cockroach: its humour. He coolly observes the absurdities around him and he does not hesitate to draw bizarre links between different aspects of the world. His sister’s masturbation practices have a place in his concept of justice, while bourgeois Montrealers are easily grifted because of their blind romanticisation of all things foreign. At one point, a neighbour helps him steal a chest of expensive items from an apartment. When a small, barking dog threatens to call attention to them, the woman simply tosses the dog in the chest. It’s a quick moment, barely there at all, but deeply satisfying and very funny.

Dark wit should be the book’s hallmark, but, like many of Cockroach’s strengths, it is compromised to make room for philosophy and metaphor. Perhaps the greatest compliment one can offer the novel is that it succeeds despite many missed opportunities. Certainly, this bodes well for Hage, whose promise as an author is buttressed by this latest submission – which is much more than one can say for other sophomore efforts. After all, there is not a new author on Earth who could view Hage’s situation without a mix of jealousy and sympathy. Expectations were high for Cockroach – especially in Canada, where our literary establishment is graying and wrinkling, and our hunger for a new generation is growling wildly – and its author delivered. Though the novelty of the first-time writer has worn off of Hage, we should be salivating for his next book now more than ever.