Two big new novels from young, male Newfoundland authors appeared in bookstores this season, and they could hardly have less in common. Michael Winter’s The Big Why, despite its dabblings in high art and unorthodox sex, is a mostly conventional historical novel, portraying an early-20th-century Newfoundland of lobster traps and schooners, gale-swept shores and hearty pioneers.

The Nine Planets, by contrast, gives us urban St. John’s in 1999, a city of fast food joints, subdivisions, and snotty private schools, populated by sullen teenagers, boozy playwrights, and conniving developers. It’s almost as if the two authors sealed a gentleman’s agreement, before embarking on their respective novels, that one would focus on the historical yin of the Rock, the other on the contemporary yang.

At the centre of The Nine Planets is Marty Devereaux, vice-principal and co-owner of The Red Pines, a local private school in the business of banking the loutish offspring of the St. John’s burgher class until they’re ready to be shipped off-island to university. If Marty is the book’s central sun, around which all else revolves, he sure doesn’t give off much heat, or light. He’s a bachelor with a long-term lover he can’t be bothered to genuinely love. An educator who must constantly struggle to conceal his hatred for his students. A visionary whose greatest thrill is writing up branding proposals for a fast food-style chain of private schools. Yes, Marty is somewhat awful, though we still like him, for some reason – maybe because there’s a real (admittedly vastly jaded) honesty to the man.

Revolving around (along with?) Marty is a cadre of equally isolated souls. There is Hank Lundrigan, Marty’s business partner at the school and a recent convert to evangelical environmentalism. There is Marty’s troubled brother Rex, a washed-up playwright, with an equally troubled teenage daughter. There is Gerry Hayden, a sleazy developer who wants to transform a pristine nature reserve outside town into a massive subdivision, to Hank’s horror and, thanks to the opportunity for a private school franchise, Marty’s anticipation.

The novel is full of sharp, funny insights about contemporary urban life and popular culture, taking on everything from the privatization of education to the class symbolism of clothing to the dangers of rampant development to the pitfalls of overzealous environmentalism. Some sectors come in for more flak than others, but nobody’s sacred cow is safe from the butcher’s knife. Riche is a different kind of writer than, say, Russell Smith, but I have a feeling the latter would approve of his approach.

The book is overflowing, and while this is mostly a good thing, it occasionally feels as if Riche is trying to do too much. I felt a certain “critique fatigue” at times, as the barbs and jabs pile up to dizzying heights. Plotwise, Riche’s method seems to be to throw a new twist or theme into the mix every few pages. This works well for most of the novel, but toward the end the strain begins to show, as Riche scrambles to bring all the strands together. This he attempts via a seemingly endless, and not entirely effective, series of climaxes and catastrophes.

But such are the pitfalls of this type of try-everything maximalism, and in the case of The Nine Planets, the sacrifice in overall coherence is worth the gain in energy and immediacy. I think I preferred it slightly to Michael Winter’s accomplished, but less adventurous, book. Because really, why write about pioneers when you can be one?