Even a good friend does not want to hear about how bored and tired you are, or about the futility of your art in an artless world, or how unfulfilling all your relationships are. No one wants to risk infection by such virulent strains of ennui. And since literature, like a good friend, is meant to comfort, startle, and travel beyond the mundane, “ennui” is not likely to appear in sentences alongside “finely crafted,” “riveting dialogue,” or even the dreadful “luminous.”

Three novellas, three young women, three versions of West Coast boredom: Helene Littman’s first book resembles Russell Smith’s How Insensitive and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in focus, but does not achieve the irony or botched beauty of either of those. The power of Peripheries is limited by three plots that struggle to get out of Vancouver’s rain. Typically, details reveal little more about character than how, “she picked up her chicken, took a bite and chewed. ” And much of the dialogue, while it captures certain amusing speech patterns, is, like, boring or whatever:

“Oh, yes,” said Stephanie. “They used to go out.”

“But that’s been over a long time.”

“Oh, yes, at least a year. But they’re still really good friends. It’s not a problem them living together.”

“That’s so wonderful,” said Linda. “I think it says super-good things about a guy when he can do that.” Surely even readers who speak this way weary of their own words.

Still, Littman, who grew up in Vancouver, identifies accurately, and often wryly, several West Coast urban types among those aged 18 to 30: women who see nothing but malice and aggression; environmental groupies; employees of government programs floating between dull placements. But does all of Vancouver guzzle beer, smoke drugs, drop acid, and sleep around? Call it dirty realism, but the cynicism grows tedious and trite.

It is a cruel truth that small presses publish books of such promise; an editor with more time and suitable funds could transform this book. Though style flips between over- and under-writing, the final novella, “Pesadilla Beach,” proves Helene Littman is an astute reader of a generation. Her artists and urchins and smart boys understand life’s ambiguities, and by the final novella they are not quite so bored. They are, instead, paralyzed by their own possibilities.