Given that this good-natured debut by film producer Doug Harris takes the unconventional form of a second-person narrative, the reader should not assume that its title is directed at him. Instead, it likely refers to the book’s slacker hero, 28-year-old Montreal resident Lee Goodstone.  

Despite the quirky narrative voice, which is fluently handled and becomes scarcely noticeable after a few pages, Lee is a familiar character in what is sometimes called LoserLit. He is a scrawny, sensitive, self-deprecating, going-nowhere kind of guy, living in a spectacular loft apartment that he admits is a cliché while making a comfortable living selling (mostly soft) drugs. Other generic elements on offer here include the gang of friends who have hung together since childhood – cases of arrested development – and the unprepossessing hero’s baffling ability to get gorgeous, intelligent women to go to bed with him. 

Various unrelated things happen. One of Lee’s friends is accused of murder. The girlfriend of another takes up with Lee. His drug business, which he is apathetic about anyway, starts to go down the tube. All of these plot points are just pegs on which to hang a tapestry of observational humour as Lee casts his cold eye on the Montreal scene. 

Genuinely funny at times, and always easy to like, YOU comma Idiot nevertheless exhibits the limitations of its genre. The characters rarely rise above types, the one exception being Lee’s eccentric dealer, who is a wonderful comic creation. Some parts of the book, like the satire of the news media, don’t come off at all. The tone frequently becomes overly sentimental, and the subplots are resolved in perfunctory and uninteresting ways. But at his best, Harris gives plenty of evidence that he is a writer capable of doing more with less formulaic material.