Writers as disparate as Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway, Joyce, Céline, V.S. Naipaul, and Flannery O’Connor used colloquial lower-middle- and working-class speech as an animating force in their work, reveling in its loose-limbed flexibility and vivid metaphoricity, as well as the often corrosive or corruptive effect it has on a piece of writing, breaking down conventional grammatical constraints.

Canadian authors like Lynn Coady and David Adams Richards use colloquial speech in a similar way. They and their East Coast peers helped put the Maritimes on the literary map in much the same way that Irvine Welsh and James Kelman did for their native Scotland.

But outside of the Atlantic region, colloquial speech tends to be viewed as an uncouth and unwelcome guest at the great dinner party that is contemporary English CanLit. West of the Ottawa River, fiction writers have tended to default to a tamed and watered-down pseudo-British dialect – an indication that, in our literature at least, we have not quite made it out of our master’s house. Characters in contemporary, mainstream Canadian novels, when they speak, usually sound more like CBC Radio hosts than inhabitants of any particular region or economic class.

Attempting to correct this situation can lead some writers to over-indulge in the heady, forbidden brew of colloquial speech. Vancouver writer Clint Burnham’s first novel (he actually wrote it in 1995, but lost the manuscript) is a messy, relentless hangover of a book, written almost entirely in halting, pot-addled dialogue. The characters, or, more accurately, speakers, are a group of youngish men and women who spend their time screwing, moving in and out of houses and apartments, discussing music and Kevin Costner’s “new” movie, Waterworld, and scoring dope.

Burnham renders all this speech with transcription-from-tape accuracy. In the only instance where he allows the book to comment on its characters from a point of view slightly above ground level, he writes, “He was a Canadian, and talked like a thrifty telegram, a brief email, txt.” That “thrifty” sounds a little out of place, but otherwise this sentence nails perfectly the anti-eloquence and anti-loquacity that typifies common Canadian speech, and which this book demonstrates in spades. (“Yeah, OK, so just, yeah, that’s great.”)

There are brilliant moments scattered throughout this book, moments where a single line of dialogue will take a hesitant step forward, mark time, get stuck, and finally dismiss its own importance with one more “you know,” creating a twisting poetry out of avoidance. And there are some outright hilarious scenes. The problem is that Burnham is never able to make of all this something truly written, something that achieves an effect greater than the pleasure of mere recognition (not that this is a pleasure to be discounted). Burnham has an enviable talent for catching the speech of the people around him. I hope, in his future work, he expands his scope in order to catch a little more of them than merely what they say.