Timbit Nation: A Hitchhiker's View of Canada by John Stackhouse, Random House, 311 pages, $22.95

The next time a Torontonian wonders why non-Toronto types complain about centre-of-the-universality, consult this book.

"During my trip I enjoy a traditional Canadian pastry known as a `donut' or `doughnut,' best savoured with a `double-double' -- a vernacular term used to indicate a coffee containing two creams and two sugars," isn't a sentence in Timbit Nation, but it faithfully summarizes the underlying style and tone.

The prejudices of the 416 area code dance below every keystroke. Stackhouse stops short only of praising PEI for indoor plumbing. In New Brunswick, meanwhile, he finds evidence of multiculturalism in a farmer's market and comments, "Oddly, little Moncton was becoming cosmopolitan." Imagine, fresh koftas and a Starbucks too!

Most people are able to take a trip along the Trans-Canada Highway without morphing into a Peter Gzowski wannabe. Not Stackhouse. Considering he's only 40, the earnest, nobility-of-the-rural-people schtick is disappointing.

The material herein is collected and collated from a Globe and Mail series entitled "Notes from the Road" that ran during the summer of 2000. Those adequate columns -- about Stackhouse hitchhiking across Canada in a month -- have been repurposed into an inadequate book. If drive-by journalism refers to "hit-and-run" reporting that lacks depth and care, then the car bingo of Timbit Nation is backseat-driver journalism.

This book reinforces entrenched Canada cliches that require immediate extermination: Canadians are a polite people! Montreal is filled with beautiful, diffident chain-smokers! Albertans are rednecks! Gosh golly gee-whiz Martha! Look at what the city-slicker from Hogtown wrote about us Saskatchewan farmers!

Canada isn't a petting zoo. When Stackhouse writes about "hoping to get a ride from a storybook Cape Bretoner, a people whose charm and wit is too great for their island to contain," one wonders if what he's really looking for is a leprechaun.

Equally irritating are the dozens of folksy platitudes. At one point, Stackhouse gets a ride from Montreal to Ottawa with Jean, a Hells Angel specializing in cocaine transactions. Jean explains how the gang operates in the city, prompting Stackhouse to comment, "It sounded like the kind of paternalism that Champlain would have admired." This is not revisionist history. Try ridiculous.

Occasionally, the formula manages to click: "Now 23, Alex was firmly part of Quebec's lost generation, the children of Levesque who saw little hope in independence because they saw little hope in the old men who kept telling them it would be good for Quebec." Yet, three pages later is a double-shot of hokum directed at Saint-Hyacinthe, a city near Montreal: "I sensed I was entering a more frenetic land, the realm of the big city, where even a fast-food order was faster."

But credit where it is due: Stackhouse manages to make a month spent in cars and the sides of highways interesting. His writing pace and style avoids the potential monotony of 9,000 kilometres and 97 rides spread over 30 or so days. We learn the brand of cigarette each driver smokes, their job, what car they drive ... the details are as rich as his analysis is poor.

Yet in trying to cover the country in a month, his experiences are stretched too thin. The problem with the time limit is that every event has to be transcendent. By necessity, meaning must lurk in every tractor pull, whisky distillery and cattle show. Like a doughnut hole, the book lacks the substance required to leave you feeling satisfied.

Cut Pile

Stackhouse also has an unusual, mostly successful ability to reference and weave previous drivers and conversations into later portions of the book, making his rides seem more than simple cameos. He's like the guy at a party who remembers everyone's name.

Stackhouse provides many thoughts, theories and observations on life as a hitchhiker. I was surprised to discover that many drivers will give the finger to those pitching their thumb by the side of the road, their anger based on notions of parasitism. Through trial-and-frequent-error, Stackhouse becomes a consummate ride-hopper by book's end.

Given the title, you'd think this was a profound musing on the changing Canadian landscape. Stackhouse does note the everywhere emergence of big box everything, and his concluding lament is for a nation that is becoming increasingly urban and suburban: "As much as we are a people shaped by nature and its myths, fewer and fewer Canadians have much to do any more with the rocks, water and wildlife that the rest of the world so often sees as us."

A more appropriate title for this book is Tidbit Nation. Every once in a while, we get a wonderful little nugget of lore (a Cape Bretoner is "a Newfie who went broke on the way to Toronto"), a bizarre discovery (Bill's Newfie Store in Dryden, Ontario) or a curious trend ("northern and remote communities tended to have two choices on the radio: CBC and E-Z Rock.") And when Stackhouse decides to blend into the passenger seat and let his patron do the talking, the writing cruise-controls on the strength/power of the eccentricities and insights of total strangers.

We learn the brand of cigarette each driver smokes, their job, the kind of car they drive, how well and how fast they drive it -- even their entire life-story in some cases. The details are as rich as his analysis is poor.

But in trying to cover the country in a month, his experiences are stretched too thin. The problem with the time limit is that every event has to be transcendent. By necessity, meaning must lurk in every tractor pull, whisky distillery and cattle show. Like a donut hole, the book lacks the substance required to leave you feeling satisfied.