Author Norman Ravvin is a Calgary native who has lived in Vancouver and Fredericton and now teaches in Montreal, so perhaps it’s no surprise that his new book is a kind of road novel (perhaps better described as a collection of linked short stories) that logs a lot of travel miles.

The book focuses on relationships between fathers and sons. The central character, Paul, is the divorced father of Nick, a sweet child filled with a sense of wonder at the world. Paul’s own father abandoned him when he was just a child; when he died, Paul’s father left him a fleet of vintage automobiles as an inheritance. Shortly after receiving this windfall, Paul’s Toronto home burns down, freeing him to spend much of the rest of the book shuttling about with Nick. They live for a while on the West Coast and chase a distant cousin around America. As well as representing Paul’s rootlessness (he even dreams about cars), the road becomes an instrument of fate, leading to a series of real and metaphorical smash-ups.

Of course, the biggest wreck is the inevitability of getting older and having to watch as things fall apart. Paul has a sense that his true “inheritance consists of things that suddenly slip away, and he swears he will end this pattern when it comes to his son.” It is a tragic delusion, since the pattern he hopes to disrupt is life itself. Paul wants Nick to hold on to his innocence forever, but “everything – everything – conspires against this.”

Such a theme could be banal, but Ravvin makes it work by employing a pared-down style that displays a genuine feel for modern lives of quiet desperation and a real facility for capturing the natural world. There are problems, however. Some of the dialogue is stilted, Nick remains a generic figure, and the book’s narrator – a “childless loner” who has an ambiguous relationship with Paul – never really engages the reader.

On the whole, The Joyful Child wears its heart on its sleeve and offers fiction in a confessional mode, with all the rawness and occasional awkwardness that implies.