Unsure precisely what this might betray regarding my meticulousness as a reader, but it was roughly halfway through Half-Bads In White Regalia before I realised that Cody Caetano had written a memoir, as opposed to a novel. Granted, the book’s narrator is also named Cody; it’s a recognised literary device! That, and its original Canadian publication four years ago saw Caetano showered with praise for recounting an Ontario childhood steeped in poverty, abuse and dysfunction with linguistic inventiveness and immersive dialogue – but one shouldn’t read other reviews before gathering one’s own thoughts, of course.
Half-Bads is a hell of a story in large part because Caetano writes like a novelist who writes like a poet (he is also known to be that latter thing). Cody speaks to us with this strange off-kilter flow that’s sort of Beats-adjacent, probably rap-influenced, and occasionally utilises First Nations terminology. The author is Anishinaabe on his mother’s side, Portugese on his father’s, and sometimes this is of no specific relevance to the family’s tribulations until something happens which underlines why it is in fact very relevant to modern Canadian life.
The tribulations are extensive, and the times of financial and emotional respite are only ever a calm before a storm. O Touro, father of Cody and Cody’s older brother and sister, is a deadbeat with violent tendencies, an appetite for every passing vice and a pre-marriage origin story which he gets a cutaway chapter to tell (instantly sounding the unreliable narrator alarm). Mother Mindymooye has more than enough demons and wayward tendencies of her own, and leaves the kids to their own devices for long stretches.
Considering their circumstances, they all seem to keep their footing in the straight world – the half-bads of the title – and in real life, Caetano now works as a literary agent. (Half-Bads’ epilogue is an exhortation to the reader to find the means of telling their own story.) The teenage Cody, and thus his adult self’s memoir, is fuelled, maybe even saved, by mundanities – takeaway pizza, burned DVDs and video game systems whose upwards-ticking level of sophistication helps to track how close these scenes are to the present day.
