Winning the three-day novel writing contest is the party trick of the publishing scene. It’s light, it’s effervescent, and it gets you noticed. Unfortunately, to accomplish the latter, you have to actually publish the results and it’s doubtful that a three-day contest will best represent your work. Fortunately for Todd Klinck, the 1996 winner, his novel Tacones is set in the coke/crack induced haze of a nightclub called Tacones (high heels) on College Street in Toronto where there are enough parties and tricks to keep the reader interested.

The clientele of both the club and the novel consists of drug addicts, street kids, hookers, pre-op transsexuals, showgirls (drag queens), and the regular slumming voyeurs. The prose is clean, simple with some charming descriptive passages: “…each other’s lips meeting in a very quick, but soft peck – her lipstick sticking to his chapped lips.” Klinck switches narrative devices from third person to stage play to screenplay. While I assume all of this is meant to create an imagistic scene from a “scene,” it doesn’t quite come together. Klinck evokes too much reaction in the reader to create an effective still life. The reader is often forced to look away in disgust as crack parents murder their emaciated baby or as rich men offer street kids a place to stay only to drug them and force them to perform sexual acts for the camera. Klinck needs a stronger structure to support powerful scenes like these. Instead Tacones drifts around like a series of underachieving Canadian Minutes.

And that’s too bad, because Klinck has access to some wonderful material, characters, a knack for finding the right detail, and some lovely phrasing. It takes courage to write about your own time, to kick aside romance and sentiment and explore what matters to you and your ilk. This is especially difficult in Canada, a country that clings to an image of itself that died over a quarter of a century ago. The 22-year-old Todd Klinck is probably the first in the generation of writers who grew up without the security of that image and it shows in the brutal effervescence of Tacones.