The Globe and Mail

At last I've seen it in a work of Canadian fiction: teeth so luminous that conversation becomes a backdrop to their dazzle. Very early in Lynn Crymble's first novel, the teeth approach Penny in a Vancouver garden centre, where she has gone to purchase an 18th-anniversary present from her husband. It's a practical solution to his indifference, plus she gets to shop.

Penny has just avoided having her shins battered by a child with a plant trolley when “What's her name” shows up flashing “immense and unreasonably white teeth” in jolly greeting. “This woman has many hilarious things to tell her. When she throws her head back with laughter, Penny can see her epiglottis.”

Husband Jack is a high maintenance retro-male. Penny cooks and cleans, he eats and litters. He is a vigorous 62, and having a wife of 40 has not kept him from being a committed cheater. Years ago, they conceived a child whom Penny lost in her second month. “She had tried to have a baby and she couldn't do that. She had tried to keep her husband and couldn't do that either.” She is now adept at burying her anger and finding solace in her house and cherished “jungle of a yard.” But there are cracks in the defensive armour.

After a mini-binge at Tim Hortons, she has a set-to with a ticketing cop. Parking tag in hand, she arrives home in full-blown crisis, sobbing as she takes in her weedy garden, broken front steps and dirty windows. Inside, she catches herself in the hall mirror: “a short and fat and dirty and broken 40-year-old woman.” Next day, she succumbs to a colleague's plan to “renovate” her life. The massive make-over will transform house and garden and Penny herself, from waistline to wardrobe – all of it recorded blow by blow in the community paper for which she writes a column. Inevitably, the invasion and exposure only pile on more anxiety.

The novel's leisurely romp is studded with eruptions of inspired lunacy

Here Crymble hits her stride, exploring the long-sublimated pain of Penny's life. Low-key farce becomes a vehicle for some surprising bursts of guerrilla pathos. One passage places Penny in a bookstore toilet cubicle after a gin-fuelled lunch with another miserable housewife. As she attempts to rise from the porcelain throne, her legs lock up. We stay with her through a dozen pages as she falls to pieces, watching the footwear of concerned store clerks shuffle outside her locked, lipstick-smeared cell.

She's rescued by the efficiently compassionate Toby, her waiter from lunch, fetched, at her bidding, by the bewildered clerks. The scene walks a fascinating tightrope between funny and terribly sad. Penny's howling laughter feels audible. That night, her cheating mate arrives home yelping and clutching his crotch – the wages of an afternoon romp with his secretary (who that morning had received a cosmetic stealth gift from Penny). Penny's remedy for penis meltdown is fresh-chopped cucumber. As she applies the healing salad to Jack's burning “thingy,” she chomps into the unsliced half and offers some insider advice: Next time, “tell what's-her-face to find a different lipstick. You're highly allergic to strawberry.”

There is, it must be said, a lot of padding in these 400 pages. Crymble has the habit of embedding a few lines of story advancement into long, vaguely comical scenes. Do we need four pages devoted to ordering and paying at a Tim Hortons drive-through, then messily juggling doughnuts and coffee in the car? The novel's leisurely romp is studded with eruptions of inspired lunacy, yet equally with long passages unwilling to move on once the joke or plot point has been established.

Thankfully, Penny is the anchoring hub that keeps the silliness from spinning into full dissipation. Compelling character awards go also to Aaron, the hunky make-over landscaper, and his partner Jimmy. Penny's blindly selfish hubby Jack is good fun to dislike, but the prize for best supporting player must go to Haggis, a culturally bifurcated Irish wolfhound to whom Penny finally bares her soul. He's as real as she is, and nearly as charming.

Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.