The Novel as Rubik’s Cube

These days, one tends to approach first novels about coming out with trepidation. They mostly ended tragically in the 1950s (think James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room) and in the decades following, often took adolescent navel-gazing and self-realization a bit too far. Brett Josef Grubisic, a University of British Columbia English professor, has managed literally to deconstruct the genre (his book, The Age of Cities, exists in fragments—a prologue, two epilogues and two appendices) while deftly poking fun at academics who do such things for a living. Grubisic’s narrative device is a delight. The novel itself, a third-person account told by an anonymous author, is found by a graduate student in a hollowed-out home economics book in a second-hand bookstore. The student brings it to a Professor A.X. Palios who, in an afterword, tries to assemble the book’s pieces while ponderously contextualizing them within the CanLit canon and the homophobic 1950s. He sees the...