In the black comedy tradition of J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, and Robert Kroetsch, My Present Age manages to take cliched neurotic characters and exploit their foibles and fancies for the reader's satiric entertainment. This is a novel that has the pulse of modern times, and although its protagonist is eccentric, even demented at times, he is really an antihero and should not, therefore, be taken as an altogether reliable mirror of reality.

In the hands of a less skillful writer, the characters and plot of this book would have turned into soap-opera.

The structure incorporates the standard conflict between reality and fantasy, as Vanderhaeghe shows us a man with several complexes seeking refuge in flights of literary imagination, and thereby acquiring yet another problem — that of unfulfilled revenge. Much of the...