THE EDUCATION OF AUBREY MCKEE

A tempestuous love affair in 1990s Toronto.

Pugsley returns with the second in a projected series of five autobiographical novels (following Aubrey McKee, 2020) about the life and complicated loves of the titular Nova Scotia native. This entry follows its narrator, Aubrey, through the 1990s as he moves to Toronto to pursue a graduate degree in chemistry. There, he meets and falls in love with Gudrun Peel, an aspiring poet and candidate for an English Ph.D. Gudrun, an ardent feminist who thinks of herself as a “neurotic, hyperconscious girl” and feels like she’s only “pretending to be an adult,” struggles to complete her thesis and gain a foothold in the vibrant but unconventional Toronto art world. Aubrey, a “very young twentysomething” when the novel begins, and captivated as much by his lover’s eccentricities as he is by her striking beauty, strives with equal energy to penetrate the mystery of a life that’s been damaged by her abuse in the home of a “DEAD DRUNK DAD and BORN-AGAIN MOM.” But even as Aubrey believes he’s come to terms with the “emotional schizophrenia of our relations,” when Gudrun’s career takes a turn that propels her in an exciting creative direction, he finds himself ill-prepared to cope with his feelings of “respect, compassion, pride, lust, disgust, and wonder” for her in her new incarnation. Pugsley seasons this sometimes claustrophobic romance with the well-timed appearance of some colorful friends and ex-lovers. The novel is bracketed by, on the one end, a disposable short story describing an evening of partying involving Aubrey and a friend who once employed him as a writer on a short-lived sketch comedy series and, on the other, a compact three-act play that begins similarly but gradually deepens to reprise some of the novel’s themes. That minidrama brings this phase of Aubrey’s story to a close in a resonant, and mildly hopeful, fashion.

A realistic portrait of a complex romance between two mismatched but sympathetic characters.