Evan Solomon is busy. In the 1990s alone, Solomon – now in his early 30s – has worked as a newspaper journalist, co-founded and edited a successful magazine (Shift), hosted two television programs (Newsworld’s Futureworld and Hot Type), contributed to a third (CBC’s The National Magazine), and established a profile as a public speaker and consultant on digital issues. And in his spare time, Solomon has written a novel.

It begins with the shooting of a Toronto media theorist, hazily witnessed by her lover – a young, professionally ascendant television personality named Jake Jacobson. Jacobson passes out at the scene, but awakens to find himself a suspect. Addled with stolen painkillers, he attempts to return to his hosting job on a ratings-hungry infotainment show – sort of Larry King Live hosted by Jerry Springer – then flees to a cottage on wintery Georgian Bay. There he stumbles upon his eco-terrorist brother, Theo, also in hiding from the authorities, after the intentional tree-spiking death of a B.C. logger. Reunited in crisis, the sibling fugitives reflect on their shared past, and their divergent careers. Then everything goes to hell, and hell is televised live on The Jake Connections.

Crossing the Distance wants to be a media satire, a coming-of-age story, a murder mystery, a family drama with theological overtones, and a sly postmodern memoir, as well as an investigation into cultural identity and the ways television can distance us from empathy, action, and our own bodies. All of this is too much for the reader, and too much for the writer, who struggles with unwieldy tonal shifts and jettisons depth for breadth too often along his convoluted narrative road. Given the high narrative stakes, Solomon wants us to feel invested in his characters. But vacillating uncomfortably between media burlesque and soft psychologizing, the book does not render a believable fictional world.

There’s an intelligent, modern energy submerged in the novel. But the entire enterprise ultimately feels contrived, as if the contents were strategized in advance of the actual writing. Only at the level of individual sentences, where some fresh writing blooms, does anything in the book feel organic. That improvisational level of writing is where great things begin, and it’s where Solomon should concentrate his ambitions next time around.