Jean Smith is an artist: like all genuine talents of the maverick variety, she feels maddeningly and wholly entitled to our attention, and she hasn’t an atom of self-consciousness about relating events and displaying emotions the rest of us ignore, forget, or throw away. She’s like a stripper who hands out Polaroids of herself, a terrorist who demands you read all her diaries.

Smith is best known as the co-founder of the polemical Vancouver band Mecca Normal. The band has been around since 1986, which is long enough for Smith to not only claim her place in pop history as proto-Riot Grrl, but to accomplish some serious writing along the way: The Ghost of Understanding is her second novel.

Recently, the band has shifted from earnest, shrieking music to experiments with texture and melody. Similarly, Smith’s new book aims to mix things up – it’s an amalgam of letters, interviews, musings, reportage, and floating dialogue. There’s a plot – but not one that sits up and begs – that centres around a Smith simulacrum named Claudine, who finds herself, literally, on a febrile exploration of places where the water meets the woods on the B.C. coast.

The book starts with a sort of manifesto of Jean/Claudine’s absorptions – the sea, darkness, ambiguity, the evolution of cultural ideas (including punk), and “the razor’s edge between ‘order’ and ‘chaos’.” When the narrator moves to a cottage on the beach we get miasmic transcripts of her thoughts – memories of old boyfriends, reflections on drunk intruders, a look back at her performance in a porn film – together with scraps of correspondence, and interviews.

Altogether, perhaps a third of the book is flat-footedly pretentious with repeated motifs like, “Are we always drawing backwards?” The lack of editing rigour is a real barrier, but ultimately one can find grudging admiration for an anarchist chick who’s obsessed with decaying aqueducts, and what famous explorers actually ate.