While Colin McAdam admits to being a grump when he is working on his writing, he is a happy fellow at the moment, and why shouldn’t he be? Just days before being interviewed by the McGill News, McAdam’s wife, writer Jaclyn Moriarty, gave birth to the couple’s first child.

McAdam, who recently relocated to Sydney, Australia, volunteers to pay for the phone call for the interview since “calling cards are as cheap as borscht down here.” He calls from a phone booth around midnight Sydney time and McAdam admits to be sipping from a “jar of whiskey.” Clearly the celebration continues.

When asked what his recollections are of McGill, McAdam laughs. “I was a vaguely miserable undergraduate,” he says before quickly correcting himself. “Actually, I was having lots of fun when I suddenly realized that I wasn’t going to get very far having fun. That’s when I turned miserable.”

But the misery melted away when McAdam met a professor who would become a pivotal figure in his life.

He credits his signing up for a classics course taught by Anne Carson as the moment that set the writing gears in motion, however indiscernible at the time. Already well respected worldwide as a poet and a scholar, Carson was, in McAdam’s words, “on her way to glory.

“Anne taught me how to read Greek and we started a writers’ workshop together. Later on, she was instrumental in getting my novel published. McGill was really where it all started for me.”

That McAdam spent much of his time as an English literature undergrad under the tutelage of one of the world’s premier poets is supremely evident from the very outset of Some Great Thing. Set in Ottawa during the construction boom of the ’70s, McAdam’s novel follows the lives of Simon Struthers, a privileged, womanizing bureaucrat, and Jerry McGuinty, a rough-edged, self-made homebuilder. Writing from the perspective of multiple characters, McAdam saves his best poetry, albeit of the blue collar variety, for McGuinty.

“I built this house. Four-square, plaster walls, buttressed from toe to top with an iron goddamn will, my friend, standing proud proud proud,” McGuinty tells readers by way of introduction. “I hammered it into the ground and I pushed it to the sky, and with the grace of God and the sweat of men I will build a thousand more.”

The voice of Jerry McGuinty first emerged as a protest in the hallowed halls of academe that spawned McAdam’s interest in writing. Doing his PhD at Cambridge on 17th-century political translations of Greek, McAdam’s patience had reached a breaking point. “I was going nuts writing in this academic language. I thought it would be interesting to translate all this in a more secular voice.”

Jaclyn Moriarty

Working in a computer lab, McAdam opened up a new Word document and began free-forming as McGuinty – the narrative alter-ego who formed the foundation of his literary breakthrough. “It really was a ‘Eureka!’ moment for me.” The resulting novel was hailed by the Governor General’s Literary Award jury – Some Great Thing was a best fiction finalist in 2004 – as a “bravura accomplishment of voice and style, a burst of pure energy.” Literary critic Noah Richler declared the novel would “reinvigorate Canadian fiction.”

For his part, McAdam is both bemused and confused at being hailed as one of the new torch bearers for our national fiction. The son of a diplomat, he has lived in Hong Kong, Denmark, England, Australia, Bermuda and Canada.

“I started the book in Cambridge and finished it in Australia, but I was really pining for Canada while I was writing,” he says. “It made me start thinking about what home is and how we define the space around it. The novel is about how people shape space in terms of their particular passion and curious needs. A lot of CanLit is preoccupied with place and space, so I guess I wrote a Canadian novel without really intending to.”