FICTION Lee Rourke’s first novel, THE CANAL (Melville House, June), features an unnamed, bored first-person protagonist, but the book doesn’t have the quirky and solipsistic observations that solitude spawns and that many debut novelists cram onto the page. For lack of anything better to do, the narrator quits his job and sits each day by a London canal. A woman stranger soon joins him and relates a story that pierces his

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