The elegiac tone of Jonathan Goldstein’s first novel, Lenny Bruce Is Dead, doesn’t have much to do with the death of the iconoclastic, detatched comic of the title. Rather, Josh, who lives in Montreal, is mournful of people closer to home; he’s hard of love and feeling emptied by the death of his mother. Moving in with his increasingly unpredictable dad, he’s troubled by memories of childhood, awakened to them by the smells of feet and food.

Lenny Bruce’s sort of energy lightens Josh’s humour. He imagines himself to be a “neurotic Jewish rooster” and has many a winking comic turn: an overwhelming scent is compared to a cross between “a brand new board game” and “a ten-year-old crapping his pants while hanging from the monkey bars.” At the same time, many of Josh’s obsessions – bathrooms, excrement, feet to be shoved into mouths – push at staid boundaries and speak (like Bruce’s routines) of a tense nihilism.

Josh is most troubled by his inability to express his wonder at the world, and worries about saying the wrong things – or terrible things – and often does. That frustration with language resonates with the book’s structure, a staccato of terse fragments that isolates the characters’ observations, and leaves many gaps to be filled in or uncomfortably passed over. Still, this work is more like poetry than prose, an effect that is heightened by Goldstein’s remarkably controlled language.

Many of the characters, Josh included, are rhetoricians, answering their own questions and telling jokes to themselves. Goldstein himself can seem altogether too self-aware, rehashing the antics of WWF wrestlers with the local rabbi for his own amusement. But perhaps such writing, so precisely observed, blooms in Lenny Bruce-ish insularity.