by JULIET WATERS

On Mother's Day weekend, in the Globe and Mail, Toronto novelist Diane Baker Mason tore into Patricia Pearson's second novel, Believe Me, with the kind of review that made me feel like I should be wiping her spittle off my face. Though she grudgingly acknowledged many of the novel's strengths, Mason couldn't get past one scene:

Heroine Frannie Mackenzie's nerdy associate editor at The Dandelion Review, a book review magazine, accidentally pops Ecstasy one morning, leaving Frannie with a choice. She can sit around all day watching him express "his admiration for the gentleness of paper towels," or she can take him up on his offer to join him on his accidental daytrip. Frannie, who did E once before, knows she has eight hours before she has to pick up her five-year-old son Lester from daycare. She decides it might be just the kind of break from adult life she needs right now.

Frannie's been hauling a lot of psychic weight recently. Her eccentric, difficult mother-in-law is dying, and her marriage of circumstance to a Cape Breton jazz musician (readers of Pearson's novel Playing House will remember that Lester was an accidental pregnancy, conceived in the first month of their relationship) is, as always, a challenge. And the unusually bright Lester has been plying her with all kinds of questions about death and God that she can't really answer. A silly day lying around on the floor riffing with her friend on their mutual love of Bono, William Thackeray and the guy at the local Starbucks obviously won't kill her. The worst that will happen to Lester is that he might get the feeling his mother likes him more than usual.

Sometimes accidents do seem to happen for a reason. Lester, for example, is turning out better than fine. He's the kind of accident that might make any average urban agnostic mother begin to wonder if there aren't actually greater forces at work. At the very least he's the kind of accident that should keep most mothers reading this bittersweet, funny, smart and thoughtful novel.

Mason, however, had a different take. Frannie's decision to do E makes her "an irresponsible nitwit" and also, in case we didn't get her point, "a twit." Anyone judging from Mason's selective details (she creates the impression that Frannie is popping E right before picking her son up) might agree and form a similar conclusion about Pearson.

A shame, because Pearson is probably one of the smartest, sharpest and funniest Canadian journalists writing right now. Less flaky that Anne Lamott, whom she's often compared to, she's more like the Bill Bryson of motherhood. As a political and cultural columnist she may be on her way to becoming a younger version of Anna Quindlen, the much-loved former editorial columnist for The New York Times. At least she is in the U.S., where she writes regularly for USA Today.

In Canada, we read less and less of her. Part of this is her own doing, having quit a gig at the National Post a few years ago to protest their coverage of the war. But reviews like the one she received last weekend can't be much of a temptation to focus her wit and wisdom on her home country. In a better Canada we'd be reading her entertaining, intelligent columns in the Globe and Mail, not reading clueless, sputtering rants about her. We'd be reading what the smart and funny granddaughter of Lester B. Pearson thinks of our current political theatre, instead of what Leah McLaren thinks of herself.

Fortunately, a collection of recent columns, Area Woman Blows Gasket, is being released this week, close on the heels of her new novel. Canadian parents and fans of good editorial writing will at least get that chance to read her journalism. They should go for it, believe me.

Believe Me by Patricia Pearson, Random House Canada, hc, 264pp, $29.95. Area Woman Blows Gasket by Patricia Pearson, Vintage Canada, pb, 198pp, $21.95