As they say in the fashion world, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. In this sharp, ribald, and surprisingly moving debut novel, Bradley Somer shows he has it and definitely flaunts it. Imperfections is a wild send-up of the modelling industry and our obsession with the culture of beauty. Equal parts absurdism and societal critique, it is a comic romp on par with Mordecai Richler’s Cocksure.

Somer’s novel begins with our protagonist, kidnapped male supermodel Richard Trench, in the trunk of a car with his arms and legs severed. The plot then flashes back to describe how Richard ended up in this predicament. Somer guides us through Richard’s infancy, youth, and early adulthood, revealing how he came to be sucked into the world of catwalks and designer clothes.

Along the way, we meet a mélange of strange and engaging characters, including Richard’s beauty-obsessed mother, stereotypically masculine father, and adolescent love interest. The strongest of these oddballs is his fellow model Donna. Speaking in relentless malapropisms, Donna represents the brainless epitome of the fashion world. She undergoes a series of ghastly procedures to achieve physical perfection – facial, vulval, and podiatric enhancements that are pure disfigurement, yet raise her stock as a model every time. Without giving too much away, these alterations act as a thematic counterbalance to Richard’s dismemberment. Let’s just say the novel doesn’t find much difference between fashion models and circus freaks.

Somer infuses the novel with telling details about the rise of AIDS and the Y2K panic, and a fascinating theory that Kurt Cobain’s suicide was used to distract Western media from the Rwandan genocide. His descriptive powers are those of a seasoned pro: Richard’s militantly detached runway stare is “the expression that I pushed through my face like a fist through glass.”  

Virtually every paragraph of Imperfections teems with authorial talent unafraid to show itself off. Let’s hope we see lots more of Bradley Somer on Canadian literature’s catwalk. Work it, baby, work it.