In his first novel, 26-year-old Jim Munroe has created a genuinely hip, young, and urban tale. Forget about all the other fiction that poses as slick and cool, forget the stylish authors that promise to be the voice for the next generation and then fail to deliver anything new. Flyboy is the real thing, and Munroe will be the writer to watch for long after all the posers have been relegated to the discount bins at Wal-Mart.

Set in the twenty-something world of university students, waitresses, street poets, punk rockers, and political activists, Flyboy chronicles the relationship of Ryan and Cassandra, two loners who fall in love and reveal to each other their deepest secrets. These secrets aren’t the usual tired revelations. Instead, Flyboy’s twists and turns are truly new, speaking to a generation raised on a steady diet of comic books and Star Wars. It seems that Ryan can turn into a fly at will and that Cassandra, in addition to having had an alien lover, can make things disappear forever. Adopting the guise of superheroes, complete with costumes, the duo set about fighting what they consider crime: corporate billboards and conservative media outlets. Along the way they’re drawn into various misadventures, including protecting a Take Back the Night rally, waging a hit-and-run campaign against a right-wing tabloid newspaper, protecting children from a pedophile, and battling the Toronto police force after one of their friends is arrested for the possession of a single joint.

Flyboy is a culture jam, a cartoon-like world where everyday reality and pop culture are the same thing, where the mediascape is the only relevant matrix of meaning. Casual conversations include references to punk rock and Genet, while characters think their lives resemble X-Files episodes or Philip K. Dick novels. Yet Flyboy isn’t a critique of our society and its preoccupation with the media and pop culture. Instead, it’s simply a description of the way things are. There’s no angst here, only ironic detachment and jaded self-awareness, enough for characters to recognize the absurdity of their situations but not enough to worry about it.