Danny Bayle, the 28-year-old protagonist of Brad Cotton’s debut novel, is a frustrated writer. His first novel, published when he was 24, “earned a unanimous reception from critics in that none of them bothered to read it.” Since then, he’s been drifting and unable to finish, or even begin, the follow-up book. Making things worse, he was recently dumped by his long-time girlfriend, and his grandfather, who raised him, has died.

Bayle doesn’t quite hit bottom – he is surrounded by a supportive group of friends, and though he has quit his job to write full time, there is a curious lack of urgency around the question of money. (We discover late in the book why this is so.) He drinks a fair amount, but mostly avoids anything harder, and though he lands in a couple of strange beds, he doesn’t seem out to screw his way to happiness. Instead, he just kind of wanders around Toronto, putting himself in situations that range from the banal (on a whim, he starts taking drum lessons) to the borderline offensive (he infiltrates a weekly support group for people with mental problems).

The book’s plot wanders along with Bayle, and with the same lack of urgency. When he and the novel lock on to something with a little more weight (Bayle befriends, then tries to help, a troubled young painter living in Kensington Market), the tone shifts from beer-fuelled slacker picaresque to consistently off-key melodrama. Bayle blithely uses the people around him to make himself feel better about his relatively minor problems.

Cotton could’ve used his character’s offhand manner as the engine for satire, but instead makes Bayle into something resembling a noble hero who ultimately gets everything he wants – even the idea for a second novel – almost without trying.