Readers who enjoyed Keith Hollihan’s debut novel, The Four Stages of Cruelty, which chronicled the harrowing life of a maximum-security prison inmate, may be perplexed by his follow-up. Though also focused on men operating persistently on the wrong side of the law, the novel veers unevenly between two genres: the heist-gone-wrong story and the comic Bildungsroman.

The unnamed narrator, a “mildly successful” writer in his thirties, lives a largely solitary existence in Brooklyn, wracked by feelings of guilt, the causes of which are not revealed until the story’s close. The novel looks back on his life-defining friendship with Chris, whom the narrator meets as a child in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Chris is charismatic, fearless, and blessed with unshakable confidence, the kind of boy who inspires romantic adoration from insecure, self-conscious types like the narrator’s boyhood self.

Chris embodies “lightness,” a concept the narrator borrows from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the first of several literary works referenced in often lengthy asides. According to this reading of Kundera, life largely consists of a dialectical relationship between “lightness” and “heaviness.” If, as Nietzsche speculated, we re-experience every moment of our lives for all eternity, even our most insignificant actions are “heavy with consequence”; whereas if we only live once, our actions “have an existential lightness” and are therefore largely devoid of consequences.

Flagged Victor is concerned with how human personalities tend to orient themselves around either heaviness or lightness, with Chris representing the latter and the narrator the former. As the narrator boldly states, lightness “gives you permission to do whatever the fuck you want,” a premise the boys explore through a series of increasingly reckless stunts, including an attempt to cut down a neighbourhood tree supporting a rival kid’s fort. Childhood stunts eventually give way to the duo’s first armed robbery – of a Canadian Tire store – in their freshman year at university.

Hollihan shows his gift for pacing and action-based characterization in the first heist scene, which ends with the narrator characteristically bumbling his only task: driving the getaway vehicle. By contrast, Chris is grace in motion, executing the plan without apparent fear or doubt.

The duo’s descent into a double life of college classes and temporary unskilled labour on the one hand, and daring robberies on the other, is built effectively, mounting to a final heist that the reader knows from the opening pages will go terribly wrong. The sections tracing the narrator’s journey from struggling student writer to published author are far less effective, as are the far-too-frequent philosophical digressions and mini-essays on his favourite authors.

The narrator, like many young male wannabe writers, believes only those brave souls who’ve lived life to the fullest and passed beyond conventional morality can aspire to literary greatness. He is aided in this delusion by a hard-drinking, one-legged creative writing professor who spouts off about the need to grab “readers by the throat and choke the fucking shit out of their ears.” It’s hard to tell if this cartoonish vision of the (masculine) creative life is meant as comedic character development, but if so, the comedy is too broad. 

These sections, along with long scenes detailing the buddies’ typically middle-class college debaucheries, point to a central problem with the novel. Flagged Victor is weighed down by a morally twisted, unreliable narrator who betrays his best friend and lies about central events in the story, but the overall narrative tone, until the final 100 pages or so, is that of a buddy comedy, complete with gay jokes, drinking stories, and talk of getting laid (or not getting laid).

The banter about blowjobs and hot women may reflect how young men talk, but it’s not the tone of an almost middle-aged man “pinned to the eternal cross of consequence” and looking back on “the wreckage of [his] life.” Hollihan wants to have it both ways, but he doesn’t cue the reader by putting the male posturing into a broader context.

As if trying to leaven his story with postmodern lightness, Hollihan includes biographical details in the narrator’s life that mirror his own. Again, these self-consciously literary tricks don’t jibe with the novel’s jokey passages.

Even at its weakest, Hollihan’s writing is engaging and quick on its feet, but too often the marriage of style and content feels forced.