Readers may not like this book, some for its disturbing content – especially its evangelical support of pederasty – others for its hectoring tone, but there is pleasure to discover if you’ve the stomach for it.

Here’s a trick: author Sky Gilbert, a Toronto playwright, is not (necessarily) the narrator although he has much in common with the allegorically named Jack Sprat first encountered in Gilbert’s debut novel, Guilty. Readers should remember this. It makes it easier to withstand the many passages like the following: “It’s really hard to find older men to admire if you’re a fag. (I know that sounds horrible, but it’s true.…Most fags that are my dad’s age drink too much trying to forget they’re gay. Sorry. But it’s true, even if it’s not their fault.)”

I don’t agree or disagree; I merely quote it as exemplary of Jack’s irritating and endless, digressive asides (this book is an homage to the word anyway). This is Jack’s novel, and everything – plot, pacing, secondary characters, setting – plays second fiddle to this enormous, suffocating ego narrating a teaching stint gone wrong.

Guilty was a rollicking whodunit on the subject of, naturally, guilt, and this outing also focuses narrowly on love. Along the way, Jack muses about films and books, pet theories, and old enemies and young lovers. And he lusts after the students he has wound up teaching. The trouble with St. Stephen’s (named after his college, which is named after a saint who kick-starts the plot late in the proceedings) is genre. If Gilbert had crafted these into essays (remember: he’s not the narrator), we could forgo plot and, instead, inhabit one opinionated mind for a series of dizzying moments. Stringing them together, however, just doesn’t work. Gilbert is a fine, inventive writer, but not, in this case, a fine novelist.