The narrator of Margaret Gibson’s first novel, Opium Dreams, is “grown-poet and some-time short-story writer Maggie Glass,” a Canada Council grantee who has published “one award-winning short-story book and one award-winning poetry book.” Maggie confesses, “It is the writing that has kept me alive” during her 40-year struggle with epilepsy’s auras and fugues, enduring careless medicine and a family that craves normalcy.

Gibson has written before of characters with irreverent, disobedient brains. And since Gibson is autistic, a writer who has likewise suffered misdiagnosis, poverty, and stigma, it would be coy to ignore the similarities between Maggie and Margaret. And without this lure of authenticity, the book might not stand since Gibson is not yet able to pull magic from the novel form.

Maggie’s father, Timothy Glass, is in the final throes of Alzheimer’s, and Opium Dreams negotiates, chapter by chapter, between father and daughter. Maggie seeks a way to redeem him for past betrayals, while comatose Timothy re-enlists in the dusty wars of his boyhood.

Gibson is an attentive writer who fragments voices to portray the brain’s blown fuses and brown-outs. This should be compelling material. But the style is often heavy with needless repetition and meddling hyphens. Though descriptive passages adequately portray Maggie’s hypersensitivity, sentences seem burdened by syllables, as in Maggie’s bloated take on the contents of family photographs: “Timeless as the whirring of blue dragonfly wings over yellow grasses, and the hallucinatory wispy pale-grey clouds of tiny insects hovering over a summer field of purple wildflowers on a hot August day, shimmering like sheets of cellophane.”

In the 1950s, all houses were glass ones. Though Gibson attempts the Glass saga, Maggie’s grudges and Timothy’s trespasses seem only to typify the fraught family regroupings that took place after the Second World War. The characters, in other words, lack the originality and peculiar excess novels require, and Gibson may be standing too close to recognize this failing.