The humour that kept Joey Slinger employed as a columnist at the Toronto Star for nearly 30 years is on display throughout his second novel. Regrettably missing, however, is the discipline of a novelist; struggle as it might, Slinger’s profane comic sensibility can’t overcome his chaotic writing.

Nominally about its eponymous character’s attempts to reopen a local pool in her hyperbolically decrepit neighbourhood, the novel’s plot hook hardly even qualifies as a MacGuffin, though that is much less of a concern than the general lack of characterization. Slinger stuffs the novel full of peripheral oddballs, from gold-digging Nigerian scammers to an alien-probed cult leader, but even his central characters aren’t more than a series of single traits writ large. While this gives Slinger a lot of opportunities to play for laughs, it also means the whole cast is rendered not as fully realized individuals, but as so many chess pieces to be shuffled around in service of the jokes.

The author’s exuberance certainly helps the humour. “You could be smart as hell and not have any ambition,” Slinger writes of one ex-con, “it just meant you fucked the dog to a different drummer.” It should also be noted that Slinger swears like someone – a newspaper columnist, let’s say – who has been expressly forbidden to do so for a long time. This crude tic isn’t funny enough to warrant its ubiquity.

The laughs do turn up regularly, but they’re left without any architecture to adorn; everything they’re tacked to is too flimsy to hold up. There are times when things seem to be coming together, but the most resolution any character gets is a joke at his or her expense, and not always a careful one.