Bob Sterling is the Edgar Allen Poe specialist at a Canadian university. He dumped his first wife for front-row student Julia, and now that marriage, too, is adrift because Bob lusts for yet another student, Sienna Chu. Losing It – Ottawa-born Alan Cumyn’s fifth novel – opens with the formerly whip-smart and lovely Julia now enduring a breast-feeding toddler and a wandering mother addled by Alzheimer’s while Bob skies off to a Poe conference in New York with sultry Sienna.

Familiar? Way too.

Well, there is the Lighthouse Portable Vagina Bob wears; that might distinguish Losing It from others in the prof-does-co-ed pseudo-genre. Slapstick symbol or thoughtful allegory, Bob’s mail-order clip-on organ is hard to interpret. The novel’s best scene promises a sort of Austin Powers charm with Bob trapped in an airplane washroom, about to land in New York, with serious latex problems. From there, the humour – and the sex – get darker.

We enter and re-enter the lactation-numbed thoughts of Julia, the deteriorating mind of her mother, the drugged poetic reveries of Sienna, and the nostalgic musings of Julia’s misfit school-chum carpenter. Cumyn fiddles narrative style to make each voice distinct, to make us feel his compassion for those who are “losing it.” But the strategy needlessly complicates a fun, episodic plot and exposes Cumyn’s limitations: these voices and the psyches they are meant to magnify are unconvincing. Even the toddler seems sketchy and wrong.

Cumyn’s Burridge Unbound – a novel that also examines descents into hellish contemporary life – was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. In Losing It, too, his prose is sleek and unadorned, but important lines too often slide past without the punch of a good verb or crisp image. The story floats along with pleasing rhythms and amusing reversals until it climaxes (predictably?) at a Poe “trapped-in-a-catacomb” moment. Clichés of character and sentiment – tolerable for the bathos Cumyn occasionally strikes cleanly – may irk those who expect sharper wisdom from a celebrated author.