Like one of those people who love to call phone-in shows, the narrator of The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns is a combative know-it-all who long ago resolved not to achieve much but now wants to dominate the discussion from some twisted belief that the world is conspiring to silence him. The mission of short-story writer David Munroe in his first novel is to present a plausible version of such a man’s inner life.

Kearns was born into the lower register of middle-class Ottawa and dropped out of the University of Toronto – repeatedly – because “I thought the existence of Jean-Paul Sartre made France’s worship of Jerry Lewis understandable.” He took a job with a paving contractor and is still at it, though he’s now 45, married with two kids and a house in an especially depressing part of Toronto.

His response to all of this is to communicate with his fellow humans mostly through sarcasm that he hopes is clever enough to show everyone that there’s a brain atop his blue collar. Rather than admit mistakes, he’s defiant about the social class he’s elected to belong to, while constantly insulting everyone who’s done a bit better.

Violence, whether verbal or physical, is never far from his mind. “Behind me, the kids kept at it, capering like monkeys, wearing those twisted comedian faces that really aren’t so funny after all, and before I knew it, the urge to march over and whack their little melons together possessed me.”

He’s in a foul mood to begin with when the stretch of Queen Street where he’s doing a paving job is closed off for a Hollywood movie shoot. Just as he finishes smoothing out a bed of crushed limestone, the imported star, a tough guy noted for his pugnacity off-screen and on, stomps through it, ruining hours of work. Kearns slugs him and is then beaten by a cop. The story becomes a cross-border tabloid sensation, and Kearns is fired.

All this is too much for his poor wife, who stages a one-woman intervention to make him confront and control his anger. This involves his spending more time with the kids, undertaking a big renovation, visiting the Ottawa district where his personality was formed, and trying to be nice to the Toronto neighbours he despises, including a community college English teacher and an elderly Bible-toting Scots woman. In the end, he does admit to himself that his life has been “a series of calamities: bad timing, misunderstandings, questionable judgement.”

Munroe gives us many bursts of fine writing while drumming up sympathy for his disagreeable protagonist. But his skill as a mimic does not extend beyond the narrator. A supposed Toronto Star news story about the Queen Street incident isn’t remotely credible in style or diction and detracts disproportionately from the book. And the character of the elderly Scot depends entirely on faux-music hall dialect, which doesn’t extend beyond the rrrrolled rs.

The novel’s strength is its animation of an all-too-familiar personality type and its absolutely believable depiction of a dreary, workaday Toronto neighbourhood.