BAROQUE-A-NOVA

A Vancouver teenager tries to overcome the legacy of his parent's checkered musical past in Chong's debut novel, a muddled affair that attempts to blend a coming-of-age tale with a satire of '60s and '70s music and comes up short on both counts. Saul St. Pierre is the troubled protagonist whose life takes a strange and tragic turn with the suicide of his mother, Helena, a beautiful but mysterious singer who became famous performing in a folk duo with her husband and then left to live in Thailand after the couple split up. Saul's relationship with his famous father is both tricky and troubled, especially when life does a bad imitation of art and a German band called Urethra Franklin hits it big with a cover of his parents' hit, "Bushmill Threnody." Their fame triggers the arrival of a German film crew doing a documentary on the band, and Saul reacts to his father's renewed celebrity by turning squirrelly with his girlfriend, Rose, as he tries to seduce one of the two young groupies who show up to worship at the altar of his dad's achievements. Chong captures Saul's profound sense of dislocation and teenage angst, and he pens a few brief passages that get beneath the surface of the boy's complex dislike for his father. Even so, Saul never really becomes a full-fledged character, and the hit-and-miss nature of the satiric material makes for a choppy, erratic read. Chong has a flair for tongue-in-cheek irony that he demonstrates in several entertaining scenes, but this book has too many problems with plotting and consistency to be a genuine success. (Jan.)