With the media-saturated popularity of the works of Deepak Chopra and the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, “spirituality” became the buzzword of the 1990s, and the trendiest Hollywood celebrities worshipped at the feet of the Dalai Lama between ashtanga yoga classes. The career- and money-driven excesses of the 1980s no longer seemed quite as viable. This theme lies at the centre of Defying Gravity, a first novel by playwright and CBC-TV producer Jennifer Wynne Webber. It recounts a cynical woman’s search for spiritual or religious meaning, and it’s good: a dry, quiet Canadian Beat tale.

Miranda, a television news editor from Edmonton, goes on holiday to Jasper with her charming musician fiancé – who abandons her at a tourist site. She then meets Indrin, a young East Indian planning to enter a Catholic seminary, and the two take a road trip to Vancouver together. They are sweet and in some sort of confused platonic love, and Miranda is forced to question her instinct of cynicism as Indrin peels back the layers of her sarcastic self-protection. Like any good road novel, Defying Gravity has its share of life-changing encounters, from a miracle-searching priest to a Rwandan refugee with a secret. The central conflict, though, is an inner one, as a smart, cynical woman is forced to recognize the shallowness of her intellect.

The novel is firmly rooted in the concrete, which makes the spiritual exploration palatable. Miranda is a skeptic, a witty woman who is used to digesting information and getting laughs later with shallow, two-line riffs on any topic. She is defiantly rational, “lamenting the loss of the logical, enlightened world” and noting that “the decline and fall of the rigorous mind seems to be the hallmark of the 20th century.” Miranda’s wit serves her well as a narrator (she wishes she had just gone south instead for her holiday, to “an island where I could play chicken with melanoma”), and she has an independence of spirit that works – the author develops her character so well that the reader will fully believe the changes she undergoes.