Readers may not have given much thought to Toronto in the 1960s, but Anne Denoon has extracted a novel from an even more arcane branch of the city’s historical tree: the milieu of art and artists in Yorkville circa 1967. Denoon’s book unfurls the career catfights and broken hearts of a handful of art types circulating in a very small world. We meet a gallery owner, an established artist, an art-college instructor, a fresh talent, critics and curators, and assorted wives and ingenues. All of them hang out at the Pilot tavern, discover pot, and – in the case of the wealthy collectors, anyway – roar around in Mustangs en route to a spot of minidress shopping at Creed’s.

But Denoon has chosen an uphill battle for herself – Back Flip’s galleries and artists aren’t Pop but abstractionist and abstract expressionist, and most of the characters are middle-aged. So instead of the 1960s art action we might expect – basics such as Warholesque hotties, The Velvet Underground and Nico, and assorted giant plastic cheeseburgers – readers get wrinkly sex and rather austere canvases of colour fields. Back Flip is a novel set in the zenith of youth culture, but isn’t much about youth.

It’s inevitable, then, that the book’s strength doesn’t lie in the evocation of an era. For better or worse, the 1960s really were about mind expansion, especially among artists (probably even Canadian ones). Denoon’s characters are resolutely earthbound: even when they are at their most inspired you can’t imagine them in the same room with, say, Dennis Hopper.

What the novel does quite effectively is describe midlife panic. Back Flip – the title refers to a painting that is key to the plot – is really a novel about the anxieties of fortysomethings trying to remain sexy and exuberant in the face of dull spouses and career setbacks. Think Valium, not mushrooms. Thankfully, the book doesn’t play artists for laughs, or trip over brand names and historical details, and for these feats alone Back Flip works as craft if not art.