Just how detestable is Dennis Duckworth, the protagonist of Jamie Tennant’s smart, funny and oddball debut novel, The Captain of Kinnoull Hill? Let’s put it this way: About 50 pages into the book, Dennis, who runs a struggling music label out of Chicago called 5/4 Records, makes fun of the musical tastes of a woman, Margaret, whom he has just met. Not only has he just met Margaret, but he has also just bedded her, taking her back to her place after an evening at the Rat and Raven, a pub she owns in the town of Perth, Scotland. And not only has he just bedded her, but he has done so not long after Margaret quite selflessly helped Dennis following his disastrous arrival in the country, which included having the crap kicked out of him by a group of Glaswegian thugs straight out of Trainspotting.
Yet Margaret’s random kindness toward and subsequent tryst with Dennis are no match for his ruthless musical snobbery. In the morning after their shag, he peruses her CD rack and finds himself somewhat nonplussed by the fact that she owns the jaunty, goofy album Get the Knack by the Knack, which includes the track “My Sharona.” Does she own this record, he wonders, for the right reasons?
No, “My Sharona” was the wrong reason to own Get the Knack, even if it was a good, solid pop song. It wasn’t just what you liked, it was why you liked it, or—more concisely and abstractly at the same time—it was how you liked it. Maybe she sincerely loved the album, bought it in her teens, when she would sit in her bedroom and listen to “Frustrated” or “Good Girls Don’t.” Dennis recalled hearing “Good Girls Don’t” at the age of ten. He didn’t know what sex was, or what it was that she did and good girls didn’t. Still, he felt some kind of inexpressible, pre-pubescent arousal when he heard it—despite the fact that version he’d heard was recorded by The Chipmunks on an album called Chipmunk Punk.
Tennant goes to great lengths to show and tell us what a despicable asshole Dennis is—partly because he wants to keep our sympathies for the character at arm’s length, and partly to set up the great reversal that will come in both his situation and his disposition.
