[In the following review, Giangrande describes The Innocence of Age as "a book with a strangely engrossing mix of banality and wisdom."]

Faced with the distressing truths of racism, poverty, and crime, city dwellers find insight and wisdom in short supply these days. Neil Bissoondath's latest novel, The Innocence of Age, appears to offer some of both. It tells the story of a father-son conflict that embodies the clash of old, genteel Toronto and the new multicultural city of cold glitz and destitution.

It's a good, readable tale, and Bissoondath tells it with honesty and sensitivity. Yet it's only occasionally moving, and too often falls into trite and predictable ruts. It's possible that the author harbored some back-of-the-mind anxieties about whom he might offend—no small worry in a novel with a multiracial cast of characters, set in a city where touchiness rivals baseball as a pastime.

Some of the male characters are no more than rapacious stereotypes. And it seems churlish to complain about Lorraine, a good-as-gold '90s gal who handles hammers and popovers with equal dispatch. Nevertheless, readers of Bissoondath's previous work know he can create characters who are more vivid and less clichéd than these.

Pasco, the central character, is a long-time Toronto resident, the owner of a greasy spoon and five years a widower. His life consists of work, the friendship of cronies at a nearby pub, and the lonely sifting-through of memories and unfinished conversations with his late wife, Edna. Pasco's son Danny has no use for his dad's crowd, or for the city's unfortunates, people he derides as losers. He's a yuppie creep who prattles on about bucks and business to his staid old man. With true Toronto hubris, Danny decides to renovate Pasco's house for the eventual resale value and his dad offers scant resistance to a disruption he hates. It's hard to sympathize with Danny, and at this point in the story, it's equally hard to respect Pasco, who plays doormat to his son's Gucci shoes.

Gradually we learn that Pasco is driven by guilt to pander to a kid whose values he despises. It turns out he'd never paid back the nest egg he'd borrowed from Edna to open his restaurant—money that should have gone toward his son's education. Never mind that; Danny's managed to get an education of another kind. He's a protégé of Mr. Simmons, a real-estate developer and archetypal Toronto villain, who pontificates on the value of "profit, profit and more profit" and the joys of rent-gouging. The man functions as a signpost directing the traffic of the plot around him; an urban logo of evil, but hardly a fleshed-out character.

Mr. Simmons has a seamy—yet quite predictable—hidden life. His maltreatment of Sita, a tenant who is an illegal immigrant, provides the novel with its most gripping and horrific scene. When Danny overhears them, it forces his mothballed conscience out of drydock and into troubled waters.

Meanwhile Pasco has gotten chummy with his widowed neighbor Lorraine, who's as good-hearted in her own way as Simmons is awful. As a friend of Pasco's late wife, she's an anchor to the past and to some of its less savory truths. All these she tells us as she cooks comfort food, dashes off to her job at the crisis center, and struggles to come to terms with her daughter's lesbian lifestyle. It seems the only thing she doesn't do is sleep.

Lorraine puts Pasco in a better frame of mind as he tries to be of help to one of his drinking buddies. Montgomery, an immigrant from Grenada, is (along with Sita) the most vital character in the novel. He's a minor character, but when he speaks, his words carry the weight of his soul. He is ultimately a tragic figure who seems capable of both love and foolishness. Likewise, Sita combines fear and terror with survivor's grit, and a glance or a word from her alludes to depth that's just below the surface.

More often than not, the book has too much awkward dialogue, too many wooden statements of opinion that keep us from feeling the heart at work. Yet Bissoondath effectively conveys a sense of Danny's emptiness as a component of his larger, soulless city. He has an exacting eye for the character and detail of Toronto and its street life. Best of all, he shows a subtle and genuine sense of the process of grieving, and of the long, meandering road it takes through one man's life. Pasco finally frees himself of grief through a symbolic act that joins his past to present suffering and hope. It's a satisfying ending for The Innocence of Age, a book with a strangely engrossing mix of banality and wisdom.