Review by Roz Milner
It takes a lot to become a star. Talent certainly helps, as does luck: plenty of famous people just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But maybe the most important things are determination and ambition. One has to work to rise up from the masses. In his new novel An Evening With Birdy O’Day, Greg Kearney charts the early years of just such a person and the wreckage their ambition leaves behind. An Evening With Birdy O’Day opens with an aged Roland Keener, a hairdresser who lives with his partner Tony. They get high together, complain about work, and hang out with their old cat. Keener’s best days are behind him: he no longer owns his salon, doesn’t have much money, and lives vicariously through a pop singer named Birdy O’Day, who just happens to be his ex-best friend. O’Day, a washed-up talent, is about to play his first show in Winnipeg in decades. Naturally, Keener is interested in seeing his old friend perform for the first time in decades.
Keener and O’Day were tight friends as children. They were so close they were practically brothers… or something more. The lines get blurred. Both outcasts in grade school, they quickly bond over their rough backgrounds: Keener lives with his single mom, while O’Day lives with his alcoholic mother and an abusive father. Before long, the boys are inseparable and live under one roof, with Keener acting as the lackey to O’Day’s overbearing personality.
His single-minded drive towards being a pop star sets O’Day apart from other kids. He’s a talented kid – there’s a telling scene where O’Day figures out how to play piano in only an afternoon – and his goal is to get away from Winnipeg and become famous. Indeed Keener is there through it all, sticking to O’Day like an assistant. He helps plan out wardrobes and offers feedback on song drafts. He has no real desire to leave town or even chart his own path – he just wants to be with O’Day. His past slowly unfolds as if Keener is telling the reader his long-winded backstory over a drink or two.
O’Day’s drive comes at a cost. He develops a knack for using people. He mooches off his friends and drops people when they’re no longer useful. For example, the flamboyantly gay O’Day gets a teenage girlfriend for the optics, “I want to be successful,” he tells Keener, “I have, like, a five year plan. I can’t be gay in public. Publicly, I mean. I have to be strategic.” When the girlfriend is not useful anymore she’s dumped and vanishes from the story. The way Kearney writes of O’Day’s lack of regard for others is a compelling look into how a certain kind of mindset operates. Indeed, O’Day comes across as a psychopath. When he’s told art isn’t a contest he responds, “Yes it is. It’s a major contest. They don’t give Grammys for being a nice person.”
Because Keener is a smart but meek people pleaser he dutifully follows orders and lacks ambitions of his own. He buys O’Day his first instrument, a baritone ukulele, and is a shoulder for him to cry on. Soon the two are sleeping together. In return for his loyalty and support, Keener assumes he’ll be carried along when O’Day rockets to fame. But, as readers know from page one, that never happens – O’Day goes to Toronto, then America, while Keener never leaves Winnipeg. Reading the long, slow falling out between these two is heartbreaking. “A fuck buddy once described me as resembling a friendly werewolf,” Keener describes himself. That’s key to what Kearney is getting at with his portrait of Keener: he’s a schlubby guy who took a long time to find peace in his life and started to self-sabotage as a coping mechanism. The way he’s drawn in contrast to O’Day gives An Evening With Birdy O’Day a tragicomic tension as one sees Keener used again and again and knows he’s going to bottom out.
Don’t get the impression this is a dour, serious book, it is frequently funny, with characters like Keener’s mom Margaret, a blunt, straight-talking woman right out of a Kids in the Hall sketch and Dr. Stock, who tries to mentor the two boys, he wears a suit for a walk in the woods and asks 12 year olds about the latest Sontag essay. There’s also Barbara, a lesbian poet with collections called “When Sappo Sat On Me” and “I Cried Out For Her Salad Tongs”. The adults are often strongly-drawn personalities that give this book a shot of colour.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Kearney, a writer who’s been primarily working out of Toronto. He has a few books under his belt; two story collections and a novel, The Desperates, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award a decade ago. But he’s been quiet in the years between then and now. I’m happy he’s back: between the wicked sense of wit and the engaging characters, An Evening With Birdy O’Day is a funny and compelling read.
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Roz Milner (she/her) is a freelance writer and critic based in the Toronto area. Her work has appeared in Broken Pencil, Lambda Literary, Xtra, The Quarantine Review, The Temz Review, and many other places. She is currently working on a collection of short fiction.