[In the following review, Glover calls The Puppeteer “a literary confection of the first order,” but concedes that it may not be for everyone.]

I once knew a man in New York who worked as a buyer of rare works of art, which he collected worldwide, mostly as a tax dodge for wealthy clients who paid low prices and then donated the works to institutions at inflated paper values. One of his clients happened to be a Calgary oil baron who might have been a model for the mythically rich, half-blind transvestite millionaire named Jack Deemer who narrates Robert Kroetsch’s clever new avant-garde novel The Puppeteer.

Jack Deemer is a collector extraordinaire—of people as well as objects d’art. He has warehouses full of the latter, but people he has found somewhat less tractable. His wife Julie, for example, is dead, killed in a mysterious car crash in Portugal four years before, after spending a vacation in bed with Billy Dorfendorf, Deemer’s collecting agent, and a Portuguese dwarf named Dr. Manuel De Medeiros, who scouted spas for his wealthy but ailing master.

Dorfendorf subsequently murders Dr. De Medeiros in an undeveloped British Columbia spa called Deadman Spring, although no body is ever found. Hunted by both the police and Deemer, Dorfendorf has gone into hiding in Vancouver where he works nights as a, yes, social-worker-cum-pizza-delivery-man known as Papa B.

Enter a writer named Maggie Wilder, recently settled in Vancouver after abandoning her icon-collecting husband to his obsessions in Greece. Maggie plans to hole up in her cousin George’s house (George is a botanist, a collector of rainforest plants that litter the house) and write a biography of her wedding dress, which she happens to be wearing the night she opens the door to take delivery of a pizza.

Maggie’s wedding dress just happens to be the wedding dress Julie wore when she married Jack Deemer. It was hand-made by a woman named Josie Povich who just happens to work in the pizzeria for which Dorfendorf makes deliveries. Maggie bought the dress second-hand, after Deemer returned it to Josie the day after his wedding. The dress is the reason Maggie married her icon-collecting husband—the dress is a strange and magical object, the reason for everything and the object of everyone’s desire.

It is not clear why Jack Deemer wants the wedding dress back, but he does. Nor is it absolutely clear why he returned it to Josie Povich after the wedding in the first place. But this is part of the structural charm of the avant-garde. Motivation, a stalwart crutch of verisimilitude, isn’t important, whereas coincidence, repeating imagery, and repeated event are.

The Puppeteer is a whimsical tissue of coincidence and repeated pattern (embroidered on the wedding dress is a miniature copy of the wedding dress). At every point it intentionally disappoints conventional novelistic expectation. It leaves its tools in the wall, so to speak.

It plays with literary echoes—and is a sort of murder mystery (though it turns out there hasn’t been a murder). The puppeteer motif brings to mind John Fowles’s The Magus. Deemer is an ancient magician, an oil-patch Tiresias. And the unexpected shifts of point of view—the novel begins in the third person in Maggie’s mind but intermittently slips into Jack Deemer’s first person—look backward to Nabokov or Hubert Aquin.

The Puppeteer also relies heavily on set-piece riffs, heavy with implication and connected to the narrative proper by a network of analogies and repetitions. For example, there is a lovely sequence of scenes after Papa B. takes refuge in Maggie’s attic. Papa B. turns the attic into a Greek shadow-puppet theatre, acting out his version of the novel (like the dress embroidered on the dress), mesmerizing Maggie, gradually winning her over and luring her into the (shadow) play.

This is all splendid fun, a literary confection of the first order that is still perhaps an acquired taste (some readers will balk at giving up their standard plots and emotional hooks). And it is not without meaning. Kroetsch deploys two of his own early literary hobby-horses—collecting and spas—as, one suspects, a half-mocking critique of white Western civilization. Are we not, he seems to say, dooming ourselves to pratfall and tragicomedy with our obsession about controlling material things and prolonging life?

But such thematic interpretation is peripheral to Kroetsch’s main project, which is really a critique of conventional theories of meaning and the traditional novel. The book’s final joke involves some Greek icons that Deemer is trying to collect (read, “steal”) from Maggie’s husband, one of which represents the face of God.

The substance of The Puppeteer keeps disappearing as the reader reads, and the ever-beckoning, ever-receding picture of God is like the meaning of the book, an emblem of all meaning—which is to say that the universe is a riddle, sure enough, and a bit of a tease.