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Toby: A Man - Available Where Books Are Sold

Etiquette, to Toby Ménard, is more than a set of forgotten rules about how to act in social situations. It is an outer representation of our inner lives. It is dignity and grace, beauty and truth.

Toby is a men’s etiquette commentator on the top-rated television chain in Quebec and Eastern Ontario. He rises above Montreal on a series of billboards. He has it all. But in the days after his father has a startling accident, Toby makes a series of terrible, wincing choices. He is fired from his job and loses his superb condo, his beautiful girlfriend, and his black sapphire metallic BMW 335i sedan.

Worse still, he is forced to move back to the grey Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux and live in the basement of his parents’ bungalow.

His Blackbery goes silent. He has no saviours. He has reached the limits of misery and humiliation. But his father’s increasingly frightening behaviour is where the real trouble, and risk, lies. Who is this man? What can Toby do to help?

Is there room for the lost arts of dignity and grace in his parents’ basement?

Then, in a moment of misplaced gallantry, Toby encounters an unstable Francophone mother who disappears and abandons her two-year-old son, Hugo, to his care.

Trapped with a toddler and forced to deal with his father’s tragedies, Toby emerges from the basement bungalow of his thirties — muddy, broke, bruised, heartbroken — but finally, a man.

Reviews of Toby: A Man

Toby: A Man displays more sophistication, wit and insight than the majority of literary fiction published in Canada today… Especially good are the scenes in which Toby, an only child, is confronted by his own feelings of horror, betrayal, guilt and helplessness at the forced realization of his elderly parents' declining powers.

-Toronto Star

Babiak's firm, eloquent narrative style and keen ear for natural dialogue ensure the swift and sure flow of the story. There are many moving moments, and the book is lightened with humour, particularly in the character of the television tycoon who becomes Toby's mentor. The story grips away and never falters, and the Montreal setting is fully evoked and used to excellent effect.

-Globe and Mail

The transformation of Toby from self-conscious "gentleman" to involved, feeling "man" is handled deftly, and with grace and subtlety.

As one might expect from Babiak, Toby: A Man also allows for a range of broad humour, from hilarious set pieces (as when Toby attempts to change Hugo's dirty diaper in the bathroom of one of his parents' hotdog restaurants, with Toby walking "in circles to psyche himself up, a boxer who knows he is outmatched by the fiend in the ring") to insightful caricatures (including that of Mr. Demsky, the aging, debauched and oddly wise owner of the TV station, who emerges as the closest thing Toby has to a friend). The writing is breezy and witty, subtly subversive.

-Ottawa Citizen

Like The Garneau Block, Babiak’s 2006 satire on modern life in oil-rich Edmonton (which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), Toby is a vivid, humourous portrait of Canadians navigating the mores of our culture in a subtle self-effacing (in other words, archetypically Canadian) fashion. This time, however, Babiak has shifted his focus from Alberta to the middle-class, Anglo suburbs of Montreal’s West Island, giving him the opportunity to explore facets of Canadianness untouched in his previous novels: the gulf between English and French Canada, and between Anglo residents of Quebec and pûres laines. These cultural clashes add depth and complexity to an already compelling cast of characters.

...so deliciously cringe-worthy it could stand shoulder to shoulder with the best of Ricky Gervais.

Babiak exploits the family dynamic in the same way as Woody Allen.

-Quill and Quire

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