Writers like Lola Lemire Tostevin resist the ordinary and predictable in sentences and plots. While she hasn’t sold a zillion books, Tostevin has enjoyed a fine reputation as a thinking, feeling, inventive crafter of fiction and poetry. The Jasmine Man, though, falls short of her previous lofty esthetic ideals.

The novel follows Amy – young mom yoked with an unfinished art history thesis – on sabbatical with her psychoanalyst/academic husband, Gilles. Bored and ignored, Amy falls hard for Habib – Arab, handsome, sufi wannabe – and while Gilles is in Paris, Amy and Habib have plenty of sex in the Tunisian desert.

The settings automatically propose lovely details and associations between people and habitats, good food. But apart from a running discourse on the nature of mirages and some fig imagery, Tostevin employs an anti-exotic aesthetic: snapshot, another snapshot. Her approach may support some of the novel’s themes – cultural and personal tourism, Otherness, the slipperiness of translation – but the reader remains a touristic outsider, unable to inhabit the story. The scenes we most want to watch – when Amy turns quasi-whore to earn the cash to bring Habib back to Paris – are left out.

So, too, are conventions of characterization. The reader knows Amy only according to her irritating behaviour: she is despicable and selfish. The lousy and sad things she does are often accompanied merely by her own one-line summary of how she feels. She miscarries a baby at six months and feels bad. She doesn’t tell her second child that his father is Habib and doesn’t feel bad. Given the way she tells her story, it is impossible to know what either Habib or cuckold Gilles or even little Jonathan ever saw in Amy.

It is exciting when an established writer ventures into new styles. The Jasmine Man, though, reads like the work of a novice muddling through ideas, learning – the hard way – the risks of cliché and sloppy writing.