Paul Brenner is an unremarkable middle-aged man, leading an unremarkable life. The Vancouver contract lawyer has a job at which he is proficient; a religious ex-wife; a mother in an assisted-living facility; a woman he sees regularly for meals and companionship; a daughter living in New York; and a son, David, in his twenties, with whom he regularly has dinner. When David is murdered by a group of gay-bashing teenagers in Stanley Park shortly after one of these dinners, Brenner’s unremarkable life goes sharply off the rails.

Hold Me Now, the first novel from Toronto writer Stephen Gauer, traces Brenner through the years following his son’s murder. While the subject of the book is charged, especially for parents, the novel, told in a series of short, crisp chapters, portrays Brenner’s experience in a curiously detached manner.

Brenner’s grief festers within him, and he turns to alcohol and sex with prostitutes as coping strategies. His relationships with his former wife and his daughter, Elizabeth, ebb and flow as Brenner grasps at intimacy and oblivion in equal measure.

This should be powerful stuff. However, despite the concreteness of Gauer’s language and his unflinching treatment of scenes involving Brenner masturbating, clumsily negotiating with escorts, or trailing David’s juvenile killer, the reader is held at a distance. The dialogue is stilted and oddly formal, and the novel as a whole conveys a feeling of numbness, a sensation appropriate in the immediate aftermath of David’s murder, but one that quickly becomes wearying.

More significantly, the detached treatment blunts the effect of Brenner’s realizations about himself and the world around him, and the changes he undergoes late in the novel. What could have been a powerful, striking story is hampered by its own design.