Janice Kulyk Keefer Thieves

Reviewed by ELEANOR BLACK

While reading Thieves, the year's second literary novel based on the life of Katherine Mansfield, I itched to throw it aside and pick up Mansfield's own work. No more of this syrupy fill-in-the-gaps stuff, I thought, I want the cool and brainy Bliss, Her First Ball, The Garden Party. Give me the source.

And yet that yearning to revisit Mansfield's legacy was inspired by Canadian author Janice Kulyk Keefer's considerable skill in bringing our greatest short-story writer to life for me: a three-dimensional, deeply flawed, infuriating, wickedly charming and — above all — fascinating person.

Unfortunately, Keefer, a professor of English at the University of Guelph in Ontario, also took the time to create two baffling male characters, circa 1986, whose competitive academic obsession with Mansfield borders on the obscene.

The aloof Roger is a self-taught Mansfield expert and seems to view the author as his ideal girlfriend. At one point he even "speaks" directly to Mansfield for pages and pages of unbearably sad and self-absorbed prattle.

His son, Monty, university educated but a loser all the same, typically wants nothing more than his father's approval and affection. This leads him to an act of deception which threatens what closeness they have.

Despite his daring, I wanted to skip right past the portions of the book concerning the men and get back to the object of their affection.

The chapters dedicated to Mansfield hiss with energy. The author is winning, petulant, acerbic, mean, impassioned and startles everyone she meets: into compliance with her aims, or intense and immediate dislike. Watching her slowly die is excruciating but so absorbing that the pages fly.

Keefer is a meticulous researcher, and at times her desire to show she really knows her subject gets in the way of the plot, usually when she uses Roger and Monty to tell chunks of Mansfield's story.

In Canada the buzz is Thieves will become the basis of a film starring Nicole Kidman as Mansfield. The actress already donned a big nose to pose as Mansfield's literary nemesis, Virginia Woolf, for an adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours. Will she now develop a pretty hacking cough to bring our Katherine to life? I'd rather read the book, despite its annoyances.

Publisher: Flamingo

Price: $34.99

* Eleanor Black is a canvas senior writer