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The Shadow Boxer, Steven Heighton's tough-minded first novel, is about a passionate small-town writer on the make: "At twenty-four, soon after his father's death, Sevigne Torrins went down from the Soo to the city to make it, to make himself a writer, swagger, shine and recite on the ivory stages, find love - all the old dreams." It is just before the last recession, 1991, but after the latest communications advancements of the cell phone and the Internet - a dizzyingly distracted world for such dime-a-dozen aspirations.

The novel opens with a set of circumstances that read like a chain reaction. Sévigné is named after his Quebecois mother, Martine Sévigné Chambaz, a dancer, and Sam Torrins, a wrecked Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario, sailor. Torrins' love of life and literature are what attract Martine to him. His wretched alcoholism is what causes her to leave.

The ruptures of the future are presaged in the day-to-day events of Sevigne's childhood: "whether during the school year when passenger jets like airborne freighters, huge and slow, lumbered down in thundering succession a few hundred feet overhead, or in summer…the air was always a vapoury grid of arrivals and departures, a lesson in loss, in transience."

It is tempting to blame this situation on shifting ground. The narrative flows from the Soo to Cairo to Toronto. More worrying to Sevigne than wanderlust, however, is a sense that life, family, love, and art will forever let you down.

The Shadow Boxer is as much a coming-of-age story as a portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man story. When Sevigne takes up boxing in high school, "[t]here was a new fierceness in his eyes when he boxed his own reflection; it was the honesty, he thought, of wild animals." But his is the desperation of someone breaking free of himself.

A school of thought has it that many contemporary literary first novels by men follow a similar theme: love is pursued and gained by the typically male protagonist, and then inevitably lost; the boy never gets the girl, regardless of how heroic he is.

The Shadow Boxer exhibits some of these stylings. Sevigne's shy, teenage pursuit of his childhood friend Meeka is obviously primal, vital: "as if each kiss were now essential as breath, were breath itself…." This passion is something Sevigne will stalk in other women: in the secretive and fraudulent Molly; in Una, a fellow writer and predator; in the singer Mikela, with whom he actually gains more than he loses.

But The Shadow Boxer fairly portrays what other critics have observed about first novels: either implicitly or explicitly, whether or not by young men, they are about the agonies often associated with being a writer.

Like his protagonist, Heighton has suffered his own evolution. Some will remember him as the gifted poet of Foreign Ghosts and Stalin's Carnival. Those who have heard him read, say in Montreal during the early '90's, may recall the work from his first collection of alternately dense and delicate stories, Flight Paths of the Emperor. The author was leaner in those days, with long, curly hair - far from the clean-shaven, beefy-looking fellow on the novel's dustjacket.

Whatever his appearance, Heighton has shown steadfast promise. In 1995, his poetry collection The Ecstasy of Skeptics was nominated for a Governor General's Award. And The Shadow Boxer has been compared to the work of Michael Ondaatje. Heighton writes a poet's prose: exuberant, luxuriant, baroque. There are snatches of verse and song, illustrations, passages of essay-like concision on literature and wilderness survival, and a novel within the novel.

Nevertheless, the ornamentation can't cover the plot's sluggishness. Road of Souls, Part 1, related in the past tense, lays the story's foundation. Albeit solid, this section is rather plodding. Things pick up in Part 2, Cities of the Dead, in which the action is brought up to the present, making for some of the novel's strongest scenes. Not that the past is entirely forgotten. Sevigne finally reaches "the city." Through Eddy, an old high school friend also on the make ("The One Competent Man. Mender, fixer, mover, shaker. Happily under siege"), he is introduced to other young literary lights in Toronto, where "most of the living seem only half alive."

Sevigne's ride to the top is both funny and frustrating. It is a strange, hypothetical time, being twentysomething. It's a time when life seems so clear, clean - even though barely enough of it has been experienced to interpret anything with adequate discretion. Is it so surprising that politics and commercialism may be valued more than talent or perseverance in Canada's literary Mecca? Probably not, but Sevigne takes this realization hard.

The animal faces of a Nisga totem pole in the museum where he gives his first nervous reading remind him of "calm dignity and compassion. There it is, the state he aspires to, while day by day he's being initiated deeper into the Scene and drifting farther from what he envisaged: the noble friendships, night-long confabulations about poetry, favourite artists, films and music, lovemaking, love." Even so, Sevigne knows their "elemental fierceness" without yet feeling it where it counts. One thing his relationship with Mikela reinforces is that no act of creation - be it music, poetry, a novel, or a child - is easy.

The Shadow Boxer itself is not an easy read. Part 3, Rye Island, chronicling Sevigne's retreat from the city, is particularly rough going. Sevigne spends a crippling winter in his grandfather's camp, trying to punish himself for his lack of nobility and purify his work in the process. To his friends and family, he seems to be running away instead of standing his ground. Shadow boxing is not the ticket - not by a long shot. But what Sevigne seeks to destroy is that shadow of himself so many writers encounter while trying to reconcile the reality of their lives with the truth of their words. Until he makes contact, he can't claim to be boxing at all.