Whenever You Are, the new novel from prize-winning Alberta writer Martine Leavitt, is rooted in a compelling premise: 17-year-old Clemence, an aspiring poet, is nearing the end of his incarceration at “Training School,” a youth detention facility, where he has been held for his role in an accident that caused serious physical injury.

“I carry the Nice Lady around on my back

everywhere I go. I carry all of her all the time.

Except her arm

which got chopped off.” 

With two weeks left before his discharge, he takes on the mentorship of Finn, a new “student.” The boys grow close, and, after a disruption, are both sent to “administrative segregation,” a.k.a., solitary confinement. During their mandatory daily outside time, Finn confides in Clem that there is something in his cell: a portal, which allows him to travel back and forth in time. Clem is conflicted, split between his worries about his friend’s mental and physical health, and his curiosity about the possible existence of this portal.

Whenever You Are takes the form of a meeting/interrogation, “eight eyes to two,” during which the facility’s warden, a social worker, a doctor, and an enigmatic “man wearing a dark suit and shiny tie” elicit Clem’s story in an attempt to understand how Finn has disappeared from his segregation cell.

Leavitt, who won the 2016 Governor General’s Award for English-language children’s literature for her novel Calvin, knows how to set up a story, and the narrative of Whenever You Are crackles. Somehow marrying elements of Donnie Darko and The Shawshank Redemption, the story emerges elliptically, built from questions and fractured answers, through to a resolution that both satisfies and leaves just enough unresolved to hint at a larger picture.

Whenever You Are falters, however, due to the distance created by the interweaving of the expository form of the interrogation with Clem’s testimony, presented as poetry drawn from his notebook (which itself has a narrative significance). The structure removes the reader from the immediacy of the events, shifting the focus to Clem’s recall of and perspective on those events, and, therefore, brings into question his reliability as a narrator. In itself, this can be (and, in some places here, is) a powerful narrative approach, but the recurring shifts between Clem’s realistic first-person prose narration of the interrogation to his internal free verse stream-of-consciousness responses shatter the verisimilitude of the narrative, and introduce another barrier to the reader’s immersion in the events, with little benefit. As a result, while one can sense the potential power of the novel’s final third, it is difficult, if not impossible, to actually feel it.