In his final novel, 1978, published posthumously by Rush Hour Revisions, Hamilton-born author Daniel Jones revisited his first year in Toronto. It was just at the time when, as the book jacket says: "… all the young punks in Toronto were ripping and bashing about like it was minutes to midnight. Teenage Head, the Viletones, and The Diodes provided the best three chords in town. Everything was falling apart." This is one of those rare occasions a book lives up to its cover.

Jones genius is to present a cutting social history and a screamingly funny romantic tragedy in a style as relentless and single minded as the music that defined the era. Most of his sentences begin with the subject, followed hard by the verb. If there was a loose adjective in the book, it fell out during printing. The few that remain declare the only Comfort as Southern and the few available jobs as either hand, blown or mind-numbingly meaningless.

Like Jones, the narrator is enrolled at the University of Toronto. A trio of punk teens takes over his apartment and life. They are more engaging than his courses, or his job clearing away slops in the university cafeteria. He is a passive observer, sliding more by circumstance than selection into booze, bennies and one disasterous, thrashing gig of their newly-formed punk band. These characters are too stunted to express their ache for familial affection, though the narrator precisely enunciates how each came to that condition. There is a sense of watching the end begin as the kids offer shelter to a predatory hippie.

The author wrote where he lived. Jones was an iconoclastic punk poet and alcoholic, known for performing his work pantless on stage. Later he kicked, renounced his poetry and became an accomplished editor, teacher and controversial novelist. This book was written just before Jones ended his life in 1994.

If art introduces a culture's inhabitants to each other, 1978 is the novel of Jones' generation. Its depiction of city life unmasks the Can Lit mythology of a link to wilderness via Toronto's leafy ravines, an escapist fantasy for those able to get away on weekends. Road grit wears at the binding of each page in this book. It could only have fallen from the heels of someone who strode in from The Hammer.

1978 is a vintage year.