CHILD OF LIGHT

BARBAR GOWDY FIND THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE GROTESQUE IN `MISTER SANDMAN'

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 23, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

As much as the tradition can be traced through the ages, the grotesque had its heyday in mid-century American fiction; it has enjoyed a small revival in the last several years, with the likes of Katherine Dunn's ``Geek Love,'' Bobbie Ann Mason's ``Feather Crowns,'' and Elizabeth McCracken's ``The Giant's House.'' Too often the device is used poorly, as a sloppy substitute for complex metaphor, and the result is more gratuitously shocking than enhancing or symbolic. Oddly, Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy's third novel employs the best and worst of this spectrum, with her story's freak-show Christ child being asked to carry the weight of the book's entire artistic burden. Alas, this is too much even for poor Joan Canary, who -- with her white hair, pint-sized brilliance and mystical powers of perception -- seems capable of almost anything.

Gowdy is a comic but dead-serious writer of outrageous proportion. Her 1992 story collection, ``We So Seldom Look on Love,'' is a work defined by confident voice and unforgettable characters -- among them a saintly hydrocephalic child, in the wonderfully titled ``Presbyterian Crosswalk,'' and a blissed-out female necrophiliac. (The book has just been reissued by Steerforth Press.) If not for these stories, I'd have been more perplexed by ``Mister Sandman,'' a work that begins and ends beautifully, but wanders in its vast middle into a stumble between sex and slapstick. ``We So Seldom Look on Love'' made me aware of Gowdy's fierce intelligence, her intensity posing as comedy, and her lovely attention to the hidden illumination of the universe. While these attributes are present in ``Mister Sandman'' (which was published in 1995 in Canada to great acclaim), they're overwhelmed by the novel's uneven point of view and desultory center.

Certainly its opening pages have the crack of a starting pistol: A baby is born into the Canary family, and dropped on her head in her first few moments of life (just after she supposedly hollers, ``Oh no, not again!''). The legends surrounding Joan vary from reincarnation (that holler) to brain damage (that precipitous drop), both of which are reinforced by her behavior (eerily prescient as well as mute). Set in Toronto in the 1950s and '60s, the novel follows Joan's family through two decades; while she is the pivotal center of their screwy collaboration, each of them has a half-secret life revealed only to the child. The feckless patriarch of the bunch is Gordon Canary, a book editor of mostly unreadable authors and a man given to wild fantasies about other men; his marriage to Doris is companionable enough, producing two daughters but little passion. Their older girl, Sonja, is Joan's biological mother, though the fact that she is 15 and pathologically naive makes them whisk her away to Vancouver to have the baby. (The one-shot father of the child, a big redhead named Al Yonkers, will figure largely in Gordon's secret life.) Gordon and Doris decide to raise Joan as their own; their 6-year-old, Marcy, is too young to know the difference, while Sonja seems oblivious to anything beyond her licorice drops and her job making bobby pins.

While Gordon is dreaming of the men he can rarely pursue, Doris is realizing her own same-sex fantasies: with the well-named Harmony La Londe, even with (who knew?) the Avon lady. There are a few moments of hilarious promise, beginning with Doris's appearance on ``Queen for a Day.'' But the comedic elements are precariously realized in this novel, which vacillates between dark irony and an oddly distanced pathos. Sonja, for instance, seems a sad foil, in her tiny world of candy and TV, though we get a glimmer of the truth when her father views her life as ``the livid scabbing over of secret mayhem, another configuration of which is her good cheer.'' Too much of the time, such insight is absent, and what is no doubt meant to seem funny instead seems irritating and even disingenuous. One of the tacit rules of fiction is that it inhabits its own moral universe; you don't get to invent characters and then make fun of them at their expense.

Joan escapes that fate: dear little Joan, lugging that symbolic cross around, the font of all unforeseen knowledge. Tiny, scarily beautiful, and silent, she lives in the closet where she feels safe. Light hurts her; she goes outside only at night, to play in the moonlight with her father. (When Gordon gives her cat-eye sunglasses, she dons them and is never without them again.) Marcy, who adores her so-called baby sister, believes she can read Joan's mind; she translates for her in first-person plural, as in, ``We were tuckered out.'' The girl can reproduce any noise she hears (including the piano), lower her own heartbeat and body temperature, and seems to have read the entire encyclopedia. Entranced and bewildered by the girl, the Canarys bring her books and music and love; she, in turn, becomes a kind of blank screen of sweet reciprocity for each of them.

Joan will have her day, for she is the bright, bright star at the center of this whacked-out solar system, but the reader has to work far too hard to witness this release of light. First we have to endure countless sexual encounters (Gordon's, Doris's, and Marcy's), all concerning people we haven't been made to care very much about. Not to mention countless dropped hints: the identity of Joan's father, the reincarnation theories, the meandering puzzle as to who will find out what when. ``Mister Sandman'' has all the components of one of Gowdy's short stories gone haywire, with a nice idea at its center, lost in a maze of extraneous detail. Near the end of the novel, Marcy tells herself that ``even in so-called perfect families there are webbed feet and kleptomaniacs, perverted gerbils, some loony genius ancestor.'' This is one of the points of Joan's beatific existence, along with Gordon's scriptural evocation of Luke: ``For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.'' With her sealed-lip eloquence, Joan may be imbued with similar gifts, but too many readers will bog down in the shadows here before they figure that out.

She made a shivery noise he had never heard from her before. Was that a laugh? Could she actually be laughing? Then she bolted across the lawn to the shadow of the wisteria and crouched.

``Joanie?'' he said, and she made that sound again. She darted by him, jumping over the crevice that was his long shadow and crouching in the shadow of the house.

He waited a moment. Aside from the crickets there was a sprinkler going next door. ``Where is she?'' he said, and she shot back over to the hedge.

A blizzard passed before his eyes. Why hadn't any of them thought of this before? To take her outside to play at night, for Christ's sake? He felt like a scientist who has neglected to do the most obvious thing -- turn on the bunsen burner, add water. He wanted to wake up Doris so she could witness it, but he didn't want to break the spell. He couldn't even bring himself to take a step. He just stood there calling, him and the whippoorwill and the crickets, while Joan laughed and zigzagged from shadow to shadow until the entire lawn was spangled with her footprints.

BARBARA GOWDY, from ``Mister Sandman''