As warm as a beach blanket, as regular as the tide, and as endearingly dull as a made-for-TV movie, this very slight novella takes a clichéd idea and gives it a gentle, middlebrow spin. The book follows the adventures of three post-high school Maritime dudes in their first apartment away from home, and their encounters with summer jobs and summer girls. But the author doesn’t bring anything original to this well-worn situation, except for old-fashioned Canadian sincerity. The whole thing adds up to a sort of “Boys of Summer” as performed by Peter Gzowski: An already familiar tune acquires a layer of grizzled amiability, and steers well clear of wanking, vomiting, and blood.

It’s the mid-seventies, and Fred, Brian, and Richard get out of high school with big plans for a top lifestyle. But their penthouse dreams turn into cruddy reality: they can only afford a grim apartment in a terrible neighborhood; the cool jobs aren’t available; and their cherished plans for a non-stop babefest dwindle into the only real score of the book – Fred’s infatuation with the ticket girl at the local fleapit. Fred falls in love with the enigmatic Melanie – she of the “delicate fingers that handed over tickets and change as if they were setting tiny birds free” (one of the novel’s few nice touches). Inevitably, Melanie changes the way our heroes see themselves, and each other, and at the book’s close, Fred looks back on that bittersweet Summer of Apartment X.

Lesley Choyce may have wanted to get down and dirty with his Bluenose homeboys, but his heart – and, I suspect, his age – just isn’t down with the kids: his view of adolescence seems stuck in the 1950s. The Summer Of Apartment X is a comforting read, a book for people who believe that every crap apartment building contains an alluring-but-scary older woman; that mid-1970s movie theatres exhibited cute, harmless blobs-from-outer-space movies, not slasher films; and that drugs and young girls were mild, not wild.