As a writer, Aritha van Herk is like an ideal lover: constant and naughty. While she passionately rejects plot and its romance, and blends the roles of writer and reader, van Herk’s lascivious imagination tries new positions, withdraws at the peak of excitement, invites intellect to play. She has the agenda of a brainiac, which will keep her out of the big time, but Restlessness reiterates what earlier books proved: lucky for us she writes this way.

There is only the scent of plot in this novel. The narrator is an international courier who has tried for a decade to commit suicide, to finally escape her restlessness. She hires an assassin and chooses to finish up in Calgary, the hometown she both loves and detests. Much of the novel takes place there, in the form of a final dinner conversation between the narrator, Dorcas, and her hireling, Derrick Atman.

Van Herk orchestrates some suspense (when will he do it, how?), but she is not interested in conventions. When Dorcas writes, “If you travel enough, you will eventually lose the clauses of well-constructed sentences,” and later, “I’ve been using distance to meddle with the plot of my life, to alter my course, to escape,” the book suggests we think of writing, reading, the nuisance of linearity, and the lie of closure. “To be present but invisible is every traveler’s desire,” Dorcas writes, “and yet that very invisibility is the crux of traveling’s voyeurism.” So, too, the crux for writer and reader.

As well, Dorcas narrates extended eloquent travelogues – close readings – of destinations: Vienna, Las Vegas, and Calgary. In many of these though, especially during the Dorcas and Derrick gabathon, the writing self-destructs: “Of course, Vienna is a cliché, seduced by its own intricacy, caught in the spell of post-Gothic imaginations. Viennese streets gleam with the polish of a historical city gone tourist, a place reduced to a Disney excursion.” Good point, but over dinner?

Van Herk seems to assume readers are either gleeful accomplices in her literary cavorting, or too thick to get it (must names be so freighted?) and so style waffles. Still with Restlessness