A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

substitute high school teacher and wouldbenovelist who'll have nothing to do withhis wife's TV enterprises though living constantlyin their shadows, offers his sonrepeated doses of sanity and perspective,coated in bracing wit. Peter's bible isGulliver's Travels, "a book to be consulted ...when one is set upon by optimism ...plagued with hope and cheerfulness,"father advises son. But satire is ultimatelyno match for Audrey's scheme of "keepingthe family intact" by living the future in TV.From the Prendergasts's sixteenth floorToronto condo she launches her secondventure, "The Philo Farnsworth Show," afoolish and fabulously successful seriesabout the invention of television in whichHenry spends his adolescence playing leadingman. Eventually incapable of bearingsuch a weight of unreality, the familynucleus splits, blasting Henry out of anoverextended infancy (TV would makeinfants of us all) into the swirling realm ofmysterious motives and puzzling betrayalsin which mature folk most often dwell.For all its engaging zaniness and comicdistortion, Human Amusements is fundamentallyabout the hard experience ofgrowing up—hard in any age, but complicatedin Henry's by the mass popular fictionsthat promise the protections ofinfancy in the form of simplistic moral certitudes.It is Henry's powerful sense of hisunintended complicity in his family'sbreakup that thrusts him into the world ofguilt and sorrow where he can finally beginto see his parents—reunited but unreconciled—asAudrey and Peter, the complicated,groping, victimized and victimizingmixed affairs not even fantasy or his childishneed can keep them from being.Russell Smith's take on coming-of-age inHow Insensitive, short-listed for theSmithBooks/ Books in Canada First NovelAward and the Governor-General's for1994, also reels out in Toronto, but not theToronto the Good of distant memory orthe Toronto the Not-As-Good of Johnston's1960s and 70s setting. Ted Owen of NewBrunswick, by way of a master's program incultural studies at Concordia, arrives bytrain in "glittering" Toronto thePostmodern—a city whose recognizablestreet names and neighborhoods and contemporaneitymake it no more substantialthan those earlier urban incarnations—to"try to get into film," he thinks, or "somekind of writing." An ingénu despite hisM.A., Ted is quickly immersed in the heretoday-gone-tomorrowworlds of lifestylemagazines (bearing trendy names likeReferent, Haze, Cities, Next, ApacheSurgery), voguish dance clubs (Spleen,Dionysus, Penumbra, Aquarium,Holocaust), and a cultural life made up offilm promotion, grant writing, low endexperimental theater, and talk TV. HisMaritimer's innocence, though no perfectcharm, permits him to move through theseworlds remarkably unscathed. Not that he'simmune to this Canadian vanity fair'stemptations: he falls for two women atonce and becomes sexually entangled witha third, he falls easily into habits of selfpromotionbased on bogus credits, he fallsinto fashion. And in one of many resemblancesto Hawthorne's Robin Molineux,he falls into imagining that someone else, asophisticate named Max whom he met onthe Toronto train, will fix him up, get hiscareer and future moving, help him makehis way. When the humiliation of having tolive on handouts from his mother andfather grows intolerable, Ted weakens,accepting a job with a software companywriting manuals ("I have a cubicle with acomputer and my very own noticeboard,"he writes a friend)—the "veal-fatteningpen" fate that caused Douglas Coupland'sCanadian Generation Xet, Dag, to flee thisvery city. Ted is also tempted to flee, back tothe womb of graduate school, but a seriesof freeing epiphanies triggered by desperationand a glorious winter thaw, as well as145