At Last There is Nothing Left to Say, by Matthew Good, Insomniac Press, 161 pgs, $19.95

In a Canoe.com interview in September of last year, Canadian rock star Matthew Good spoke thusly: "I am fully expecting the book to be critically torn apart. They will call it pedantic.... Good. As far as I am concerned, literary critics are probably no better than music critics in that they are all failed authors."

His jab at music critics references one of the stories in At Last, in which Good notes, "if music critics seem to possess the secret knowledge of what components are necessary to make a record great, then why don't they just do it themselves..."

Literary critics, however, are rarely failed authors. Sprinkled throughout the book review pages are heavyweights like Zsuzsi Gartner and Bert Archer, to name but two of many. The critiques delivered by these successful authors are thus invested with a certain weight and experience.

Good has much to learn about the world of fiction. Ego and bombast are often de rigor in rock and roll (e.g. Oasis) but literary arrogance ("Mattopia: a land where people could roam around freely in bikinis and Star Wars apparel") is less advised. At Last is filled with the sort of quasi-profundity that will appeal mainly to Good's fanbase of 17-year-old girls who are always eager for an opportunity to stroke his ego, if not more. Only impressionable youth are going to be charmed by material such as "I'd ask the little people, you see, but I don't speak their language. It's like luggage their language. Actually it's not, I just wanted to see what those two words looked like in the same sentence."

One gets the impression that Good wanted to see what his name looked like on the cover of a book. And he did, despite ruminations like "The world is a big place. Much larger than you think" and "Millimetre. I love that world. Zillion is another excellent word. I've got a Zillion Millimetres."

The stories in At Last (or manifestos, as Good first dubbed them when they appeared on the band's website) were passable when free (and most are still available at runningforhome.net), but aren't worth $20. The format of At Last is an "artist's journal" in which poorly executed, cliché-rich short stories share space with even shorter, but no less banal sidebars that muse about sprinklers that make funny sounds and electric car racing sets. Most sidebars convey the immediacy of cocktail napkin scribblings and the deep insight of fortune cookies: "Something just occurred to me. If you blew hard enough into my mouth I might actually be useful as a wind instrument. I can imagine being played like a flute. A naughty business, that."

And let me not gloss over such pretentious story titles such as "Between sleep and awake there is a taco stand called nothing. Can I take your order?" No thanks. This book desperately requires a thorough edit.

There is the occasional catchy riff ("Going one stop further down the Freudian highway we come to Psychoville. Population 2") and it's abundantly clear that Good prides himself on being a rock star that reads fiction -- there are numerous ham-handed attempts at emulating his idols Kundera, Robbins and especially Vonnegut. Despite this literary pedigree, Good's fiction hovers around Community College quality, and there's a good reason none of these stories have been previously published in literary journals. So it goes.

It might be true that not all critics possess the secret knowledge of what components are necessary to make a great book -- as with seminal albums, sublime novels often involve some fortuitous alchemy -- but bad fiction gives off an unmistakable odor that is easily detectable by commoners and critics alike.