This is a funny book, though it may fetch bigger laughs than mine from the generation whose idiom it speaks and whose purported ennui it celebrates. Chump Change is a coming-of-age novel with a hero unable to. Stranded in protracted adolescence between Baby Boomers and Generation X, the narrator, David Henry, says: “With my long hair, 2-week stubble, earring, and thrift-store clothes, [I] looked like what in fact I was, and shall be evermore: a teenager.”

In fact David is 28, has two masters degrees, and yearns to be a famous writer. More effectively, he yearns for free booze, food, drugs, and women. His “drunken, frat-boy antics” sound like overage characters from Animal House playing tired reruns in Toronto – but quoting Baudelaire.

After 150 pages, marathon drinking, megaton hangovers, and masturbatory-fantasy sex grow tedious but David remains just sympathetic enough to carry us into the climax promised by the publisher’s blurb: “a writer who sells his soul to the Devil for a job in television news.”

Great idea, but the Faustian promise is underkept: thin satiric scenes in the newsrooms of the CBC (Cosmodemonic Broadcasting Corporation) about “talking haircuts,” “the info-illusion,” and news stories reduced to Haikus. It is material far more trenchantly and thoroughly savaged by crass old Hollywood.

After this brief “welcome back to the middle class,” David commits enough outrages to be kicked back into Bohemia, presumably to write the novel about how he sold his soul…etc., and how “I have failed to adapt; to my milieu, my culture, and, most of all, to my century. Everything about this century frightens me. World Wars, nuclear weapons, concentration camps, global warming, desertification, the hole in the ozone layers, the Internet, Madonna, computers, credit cards.”

David Eddie is well read, his contemporary prose buzzes with literary allusions, and he has a nice comic touch: I wish he had engaged the premise of his book more searchingly.