Ever since literature started imagining the sex lives of ordinary people, readers have been flocking to stories that portray couples working out the nuts and bolts of day-to-day romance. Take the confused Bruce, half of the couple in the new road-trip novel Write Across Canada, who claims, after making it all the way to Edmonton from St. John’s in a GMC pickup, “I need a story. I need a story real bad.”

If his lover, Olivia, won’t give him one, he’ll find someone who will explain all this to him, even if that means shifting gears and heading north to Whitehorse. When the freeze-outs between the couple stall the narrative (which is most of the time), the changing landscape moves things along. This twosome couldn’t have picked a better place than Canada to turn over their reasons for staying together.

That was the idea when the organizers of the 2004 Ottawa International Writers Festival decided to commission a national road novel. Each chosen writer was given 48 hours and a 600-word maximum to write about the fictional lovers as they pass through their local community. The participants knew that if the couple’s love didn’t survive, they at least had to find ways to “keep [the] land alive.” In keeping with many of the CanLit clichés sent up throughout the novel, the persistent smell of skunk and citronella and the noisy chewing of the industrious beaver follow the couple through every province, even after they’re well past water.

Originality blossoms, however, in the towns and cities. Donna Morrissey’s Halifax – specifically the Public Gardens – is Bruce’s idea of a Victorian masterpiece, the perfect spot for a man in love: ornate, rare, and exotic. Uma Parameswaran’s Winnipeg is no place, though, for a moony guy or his lazy poet girlfriend; it’s an ethnic jamboree overrun by creative souls who work hard at their art and live year-round in little houses by the lake. Kingston, Ontario, by Helen Humphreys, is just odd. Here ex-cons zip around on 10-speeds past heavy cannons pointed at America.

Sheila Heti’s description of Toronto is almost worth the price of the book: the only hope in this glassy metropolis is its homeless, who go around begging for Canadian literature, loading up their wheelbarrows with novels and anthologies while the Bay Street and College crowd rush by pretending not to notice.