The author of a very fine story collection, an accomplished first novel, and a well-received collection of poetry, Darryl Whetter offers a second novel conceived as a breathless blog by a mid-life dad addressed to a teenage daughter he has never met.

Our protagonist, Antony, comes from a long line of Canadian bootleggers: “Mine wasn’t the only great-grandmother to cross on the ferry with bottles under her skirts.” When teenage Antony meets Kate, his daughter’s future mom, he’s using a homemade catapult to hurl bundles of weed across the river from Windsor to Detroit. Despite the family pedigree, his “yoga-crazy drama teacher” mom puts her foot down on the matter of drug running and kicks him out of the house at age 19. We follow the stumbling progress of Antony and Kate’s relationship, his fractious history with his mother, and his issues stemming from the early disappearance of his father. 

The novel is aptly bloggish, with chronology and content having a random feel. An elegiac evocation of Detroit’s urban decay dominates a chapter describing an excursion with Kate, to the extent that the city feels more dimensional than the girlfriend. We’ve learned that she’s a lawyer, and athletic sex indicates at least one level of compatibility, but it’s not until 90 pages in that she is glimpsed in full personhood, livid that Antony has lied about his drug smuggling and that he risks going to jail.

Many of Whetter’s detours are questionable. A history of American cannabis cultivation stalls the narrative and ends with a declaration that feels overly authorial: “Every dollar we spend on prisons and workplace drug testing is waste, precious waste.” Mini-histories of the Windsor area fill space that might have been used for character and story development. One chapter visits Antony’s granddad in the trenches of the Great War; a long paragraph offers a spritely history of condoms; and so on.

Much of this could have been impressive in a more carefully constructed book, but there remain flashes of throwaway eloquence.