Meh. Not a great book. Not even a really good book. I think LibraryThing suggested it to me because it noted that I seem to like Canadian authors. I suspect it's a gender thing - I like Canadian women writers' work. On the other hand I didn't hate it, and it was short enough that it was easy to carry around and didn't last too long. ( )

To all of the LibraryThing members out there, if you have never read Matt Cohen before, I would like to give a heartfelt recommendation for this Canadian author. I discovered him by chance about 20 years ago and have been privileged to read many of his books since then.
The early books were in an what looked to me like an academic edition, which was the New Canadian Library. I grew to love these fairly bland covers. When later I encountered some of his novels with the more commercial looking covers, I was a bit let down. But I should not have been, because this makes no difference whatsoever to the quality of the book. This book is one example, and so was The Spanish Doctor.
It is depressing to read of the family that Steven lives in. His brother is sure a jerk. I would hate living in a family like that. But even my supposedly normal family has some of the downfalls that are shown in this example. So I should learn to live with it and stick up for my family members like Steven does.