For several years my parents had a painting by a well-known local artist hung in their living room. The painting was a typical, post-Group of Seven landscape of the Canadian Shield. The lake looked properly windblown and menacing, the white pines were suitably grizzled – it was a rather textbook example of the genre.

There was something missing from the painting, something off about it. The constituent parts didn’t synthesize into a unified, satisfying composition. As my mother said, shortly before taking it down, it was as if its world was somehow lacking in oxygen. The comparison may be too harsh, but Jack Hodgins’ new novel, despite its many strengths, reminds me of that painting.

In part, it’s the similarity, up to a point, in style. Distance, like much of Hodgins’ work, is haute CanLit and is thus crammed with lengthy observations on the landscape and how it shapes the lives of its weatherbeaten, salt-of-the-earth inhabitants. There are prodigal sons and daughters who move off to the city and become successful professionals, thus causing their parents much bitterness (and worse – secret pride). Tortured deep down despite their material success, these yuppified offspring inevitably head out on long mid-life journeys, through more landscape, and end up in tearful reunions with their now-elderly parent.

If you enjoy this kind of thing (I have made my own prejudice plain), and in particular if you’re a fan of Hodgins’ earlier work, then you will probably find Distance worth the read. Hodgins gives us, as always, a vivid and engaging tour of the logging roads of Vancouver Island, which of late are frequented as often by tree-hugging environmentalists and Yankee film crews as they are by larger-than-life backwoods curmudgeons.

Later, he flies us to the Australian outback – another locale he’s taken readers through before – for a comparative study of the ways that vastly different landscapes shape the lives of different branches of an extended family. Another of Hodgins’ key interests revisited in Distance is the issue of family – messy, traumatized, dispersed, yet ultimately indispensable.

Hodgins, who’s won his share of Canadian writing awards over the years (and earned a reputation as one of our best creative-writing teachers along the way), is extremely skilled at his craft, as Distance amply demonstrates. The prose is as clean and pure as an island spring, and even Hodgins’ most generalized statements seem just right. “It was the idea of things, and not the things themselves, that had kept him moving across the face of the world,” he says at one point, pithily skewering a central character.

Hodgins’ symbols and metaphors have always been strong, and in Distance he weaves a delicate lace of references to ancient Greek historians and 19th-century Russian novelists that endows the present-day tale with some resonant mythic overtones. And while his writing is sometimes too folksy for more cynical readers’ tastes, he’s willing to address the violence and darkness that permeate our complex world in the era of globalization. His portrait of Australia, for example, is tough and unsentimental, as is his depiction of Canada’s brush with oblivion during the Quebec referendum of 1995.

But for all the strengths, there’s something missing from Distance. Whatever that unnameable something is, it ultimately prevents the novel’s various elements from synthesizing into a complete, satisfying whole. There is air in the novel’s world, plenty to keep readers from suffocating. Just never enough to make the story soar.