Chump Change

It's hard to claim literary burnout after a brief stint as a glorified filing clerk at Newsweek, but the slacker protagonist of Eddie's debut novel, 28-year-old, double-M.A., would-be writer David Henry is at least singed enough to flee New York for hometown Toronto. Arriving at the airport with only a pocketful of change, David embarks on a spiral of awful jobs and unsuitable girlfriends as he tries to fake an adult life and dodge tuition loan officers. At least he doesn't have to live with his parents, and his first roommate is the erstwhile object of his unrequited college love, Leslie Lawson. Roommate she remains, though, and his first Toronto girlfriend is a persistent Korean with a penchant for Les Miserables and white pumps. Careerwise, David fails as a freelance magazine writer, movie extra and an assistant to an administrative assistant, but strangely enough, it is success, in the form of a $40,000-a-year job as newswriter for the CBC (aka Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation) and a luscious 19-year-old bartender girlfriend, that finally causes him to hit rock bottom. Eddie mines his charmingly self-absorbed antihero's pratfalling career for all it's worth, but despite the novel's willingness to amuse, the humor is hit-or-miss. The half-ironic, half-sentimental tone owes something to Jay McInerney and Douglas Coupland, and Eddie proves an amusing writer who here fails to probe deeper than his conventional bildungsroman theme. (July)