Best-selling Quebec novelist Monique Proulx doesn’t have her own web site, but she leaps daringly into cyberspace in her latest novel. While designing web sites for a rag-tag mob of artists, writers, clowns, and other would-be glitterati, Proulx’s heroine Florence tries to make sense of her elderly father’s death.

As he lay dying, he apparently made the enigmatic remark Proulx uses as a title – “The heart is an involuntary muscle” – to a man who appeared to be no more than a hospital volunteer. But the phrase turns up in a new book by Pierre Laliberté, a reclusive writer who bears a strong resemblance to real-life Quebec novelist Réjean Ducharme, who hasn’t given an interview since 1966.

Florence wants to track Laliberté down, and discovers he is married to the sister of a writer for whom she is making a web site. Terrific, says her boss and sometime boyfriend Zeno Mahone, who is one of Laliberté’s greatest fans. Mahone sends her to New York to find Laliberté while he deals with his own crazy mother.

Proulx has Florence talk a lot – some readers might say too much – about web sites and love, but the real subject of the novel is the bitch goddess Success. Only the second-rate crave it, Proulx seems to say, while the truly original are destroyed unless they hide from it. This preoccupation with a subject far removed from most people’s lives may alienate readers devoted to Proulx’s ordinary but quirky Quebec characters. This may account for the fact that the novel hasn’t enjoyed the runaway success of her earlier books, but The Heart Is an Involuntary Muscle is an intriguing read and deserves a place in any library of contemporary Quebec fiction.