According to the publisher, Visible Amazement is “a novel that will redefine Canadian fiction.” While this is almost certainly not the case, it’s nonetheless fast-paced and breezy, a funny coming-of-age chronicle that’s big on story, character, place, and narrative voice. It’s the fate of any Bildungsroman to be compared to Catcher in the Rye, but in tone, time (the waning pre-AIDS days of the sexual revolution), and texture, Visible Amazement might better be called the straight cousin of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.

Roanne Chappell is an original. She’s been raised à la boheme by her painter mother, Del, a sort of Ab-Fab Englishwoman with a colourful rock ‘n’ roll past and the romantic attention span of a revolving door. Del has come to roost, after a fashion, in Vancouver. At 14, Roanne is coming into her own as a woman and an artist. A talented illustrator, she’s already had some modest success with her cartoons. When she and her mother vie for the sexual affections of the same man, Roanne decides to clear out for a while. She hits the road. She heads for California. She has Adventures. Her companions include a cartoonist who is gay, French, and a dwarf, the dwarf’s dishy brother, a photographer who becomes Roanne’s guide to the wondrous land of Orgasm, a self-destructing teen model with a heart of gold, some aging English rockers and their various hangers-on, and a televangelical family. It’s a story in which she learns something about love, about loyalty, about pain, about death, about being an adult, about her relationship with her mother. In a way, Visible Amazement is an elongated version of that nostalgie de la boue-suffused Garnett hit of yesteryear, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.”

There are times when Roanne’s girl-woman, worldly wise ways seem too evidently contrived, but by and large she’s a wonderful creation and the story never loses its buoyancy. This is a happy diversion, and one that will also appeal to mature teenage readers.