A Drive in the Country

Over the last few years, Iain Reid has become known as a memoirist of the kind the CBC likes to draw on for a weekend afternoon: self-deprecating and mildly anxious, comic and unthreatening, he is like a millennial Stuart McLean, sharing the stories of his occasionally bumpy but ultimately heartwarming ride toward maturity. His first book, One Bird’s Choice, cast him as “an overeducated, underemployed twenty-something” who moves back in with his “lovable but eccentric” parents on their rural hobby farm. The Truth About Luck chronicled a vacation with his grandmother that unexpectedly becomes a five-day stay in his basement apartment in Kingston. Long-forgotten family memories come back to the surface to be shared; long-held perceptions are re-evaluated. These comic memoirs, fun and moving and smart as they are, are really no preparation at all for I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Reid’s ambitious, literary, somewhat terrifying, in many ways brilliant...