Jasper is unsatisfied with his job, his girlfriend Kim, and his life in general, but seems unable to break out of his rut. Change is thrust upon him – literally – when he is pushed under an approaching subway car. When he wakes from a coma months later, he finds Kim living in his house with a man named Donny. Following a phone call from a cop in rural Florida who raises questions about Jasper’s brother’s disappearance a decade earlier, Jasper accompanies Donny and his fishing buddy Duane to the Florida swamps in search of answers.

Nick Crowe, one of Knopf Canada’s 2011 New Face of Fiction authors, peoples his novel with a supporting cast that is astonishingly rich. From the charismatic and terrifying swamp rat Rolly Lee to the Falstaffian Duane, Crowe locates his ensemble along a spectrum that ranges from broad caricature to surgically precise observation.

By contrast, Jasper, the book’s narrator, is almost entirely forgettable, suffering from the same post-adolescent existential angst that plagues characters in early Douglas Coupland novels. Despite having little in the way of real worries, he is bored, restless, and apathetic. He is also haunted by a trauma from his past that drives his search for a vague something to fill an equally vague inner void. Jasper floats along like a dandelion on the wind. He’s not nearly ­interesting enough to carry an entire book.

Fortunately, Crowe has made sure he doesn’t have to. It is Donny, not Jasper, who holds the novel together. Following the subway accident McGuffin, Donny’s fishing trip becomes the true focus of the plot, and his personal development provides Jasper with a template for growth. Donny’s effort to balance his own needs with those of Kim, Jasper, and Duane also provides the moral touchstone the novel requires as it becomes increasingly dark and violent.