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Into the Great Wide Open, Canty's first novel, focuses on two teenagers who find in each other a kind of fragile refuge from the confusion and frustration of their shattered family lives. It is a love among the ruins of suburbia as played by Kenny Kolodny, a Holden Caufield-like hero with a fondness for beat writing a la Ginsberg and Kerouac and Junie Williamson, a brooding, slightly masculine aspiring photographer who wants more than anything not to turn out like her mother.
Both family situations define bleak. Kenny's father is a hopeless alcoholic who drinks himself into a stroke while his mother wastes away in a mental institution. Though Junie's family boasts no destructive addictions, the operative form of interaction in her well-off family's home is simply to ignore and avoid one another. Together the two young lovers find a place in each other where they can begin to face their own inherited demons.
In supporting and loving each other Kenny and Junie also unearth and share experiences unbroachable with their high school friends and peers. Unfortunately this kind of therapeutic friendship is dangerous ground on which to build a sexual relationship, and Canty as author is extremely sensitive to the kaleidoscope of forces and emotions involved in his two scarred protagonists' love.
As Into the Great Wide Open progresses Kenny becomes the book's saving grace. Characterized as the sensitive-under-the-hard-exterior boyfriend, Kenny also becomes the spearhead of the novel's pace. For all his frustration and rage with adults, Kenny proves himself capable of seeing a world larger than that of his or their own immediate concern. Though hateful of his drunk father, Kenny cares for him in the initial and perhaps most difficult stage of his recovery from a debilitating stroke. A strange amalgamation of curiosity and compassion drives Kenny's relations, yet Canty does not let the reader think that these traits are capable of protecting his protagonist from that which he explores.
Not surprisingly Kenny and Junie begin hurting each other. Kenny repeatedly reaches and sees too deeply into both his and Junie's lives, and it is this both insightful and self-exposing vision that widens the perspective of the work as a whole. As Kenny and Junie open up to one another the world opens up around them, creating new places for the two of them to hide from each other and themselves. Into the Great Wide Open shows Canty doing again what he does best, writing about love and heartache in unlikely places.
Charles Wyrick plays with the band Stella.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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