The word “cowboy” comes freighted with so many different meanings. For immigrants from Europe, Asia, or Africa, it can be romance personified, a somewhat updated version of the medieval knight, out riding the range, communing with nature on horseback, entirely one’s own man. For a group of Toronto executives in Lee Gowan’s novel The Last Cowboy, the word implies “white sheets, burning crosses on lawns and chanting orations about conspiracies of Jewish bankers.”

To those who have lived the cowboy life, neither of those stereotypes can tell the whole story: they might be cursing their Chinese neighbours with shocking intolerance at one moment, then plunging heroically out into a blinding snowstorm to save a cow and her newborn calf the next.

Gowan is out to capture the full spectrum of cowboyhood in his second novel. His first, Make Believe Love, was set in the same fictional community of Broken Head, Saskatchewan, a close stand-in for Gowan’s home town of Swift Current. Gowan now makes his home in Toronto, and The Last Cowboy toggles back and forth between western and eastern views of the Canadian prairie and its rigorous lifestyle. The story he tells is a traditional one of three generations of a ranching family, with an Asian outsider thrown in to add spice and an alien viewpoint.

Gowan clearly wants to keep his readers off-balance, so the story is broken up into postmodern slivers that come at us alternately from the 30-year-ago past and the uneasy present. Those sudden edits, plus Gowan’s lavish use of dialogue, make the novel feel more like the first draft of a screenplay.

Young Sam, the current-day protagonist, is a fish out of water in Broken Head. He’s a banker, not a rancher, he listens to Don Giovanni instead of country and western, he longs to look out upon the cool black rectangles of the Toronto-Dominion Centre “instead of at the boarded-up video store across the parking lot.” His wife wants a divorce: she’s sleeping with his brother Vern, who lives in a trailer down the road. Sam spends most of the book in a stunned daze following these revelations.

In the 1970 sequences, we’re introduced to Old Sam, Young Sam’s grandfather, now stuck at the end of a cow-herding life, sitting in a broken La-Z-Boy with a bum hip, a host of bitter memories, and a nine-year-old grandson on the rug beside him watching television. Old Sam is estranged from his own son, to whom he has deeded the ranch, and sees the young boy as “my one remaining project.” He’s determined to “temper his bookish and girlish mind with the hard lessons” he himself was forced to learn. His own son has committed the cardinal sin of replacing horses with pick-up trucks in the cow-herding process.

In a comic imitation of King Lear, Old Sam forces the boy out onto a Canadian-issue blasted heath, searching for that cow and calf mentioned above. A sequence of disappearances, strange encounters, and run-ins with the law result in two (or perhaps three) deaths and an overwhelming feeling of anti-climax when the plot is finally unravelled. A pair of local cops leading a young native couple to their untimely end gives the story a reality-TV frisson, but Gowan seems uninterested in exploring the resonances of the tale he is telling.

He prefers to yank us back to the present, where Sam, his cowboy brother Vern, and a Chinese-Canadian movie locations scout named Ai Lee are wandering over a great swath of southwestern Saskatchewan like Beckettian anti-heroes. Then the ersatz screenplay switches into a real screenplay for the final few pages, and ushers us out of the theatre with one of those impossibly long shots of the cowboy riding off into the sunset.

The novel is a bit of a mess. After reading it twice, I am hard-pressed to determine why Gowan believed that such a complicated and self-conscious structure was the best way to tell his story. It is also difficult to figure out what Gowan wants us to make of Old Sam, the “last cowboy” of his title. There’s a certain sly dignity to the old coot, and some interesting observations come out of his mouth. (“This country is strictly a dictatorship of nature,” he says at one point. “Other places have great wars; we have great winters.”)

But this is a man whose uncaring and ungiving nature drove his young wife to hang herself decades earlier and who can’t get close to his older grandson Vern because the boy was named after his mother’s father instead of after him. (“It ain’t right and it ain’t done; or it wasn’t until the world began to come apart and the women started dressing like men and the men started wearing women’s hairdos.”)

As those quotes demonstrate, Gowan has a beguiling way with voices and dialogue. There are characters worth listening to in this novel. But ultimately they all sound as if they’d be happier living in a movie than in the pages of a book.