I’ve said many times that Canadian novelists are too obsessed with the past and ought to get with the urban present, but I’m fine if Wayne Johnston sticks to his period pieces. His fictionalized stories about Joey Smallwood (The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams) and Frederick Cook and Robert Peary (The Navigator Of New York) are gripping portrayals of ambition. His new book, A World Elsewhere ($32, Knopf), goes back to those themes and to the end of the 19th century, when a young Newfoundlander heads to Princeton and gets caught up in a toxic friendship.
