The lines separating sex and violence are often blurred, a fact Lynnette D’anna uses to mixed effect in her latest novel. Belly Fruit explores the collisions between sexuality, obsession, art, and pain, veering in tone from the gently sensual to the brutally painful.

A young woman named Zoey leaves her married lover and heads to Vancouver where she becomes entangled in the life of George, a female writer who’s unsuccessfully balancing affairs with Jean Paul and Nancy Rider, a creator of shocking erotic art. All of the characters use and/or are used by each other in various emotional and sexual ways. In the midst of these erotic combinations, George tries to make sense of Nancy’s life and violent death in New York City.

At its best, D’anna’s prose is graphic, polemical, and frantic. When Nancy tries to explain her sexual and creative rationale to George, the tone is hectoring: “The boundaries I’ve constructed between who I am, what I want and how I create have gotten fairly flimsy. In fact, they’re non-existent.” Unfortunately, when it comes to such painful topics as child abuse, drug use, and bulimia, D’anna tends to resort to cliché to capture her characters’ suffering.

Belly Fruit should be approached with an open mind and a certain amount of compassion for its characters (Nancy, with her passion for nasty self-gratification and humiliation, is especially overwhelming). However, the uneven mixture of tones and genres (comedy, tragedy, love story, erotica) eventually become too much to bear. The ending, with its overtones of gooey romance, is completely unsuitable for such a lacerating story.