by JULIET WATERS

Two years ago, DeNiro’s Game, by Montrealer Rawi Hage, was an unsolicited manuscript in a slush pile at an independent Canadian publisher. Last week it became a finalist for the Giller prize, a $50,000 reward fund that has traditionally gone to big name writers in the prime of their careers. So it seemed appropriate this week to take a break from the usual fall schedule of major releases and dive back into the Mirror slush pile to honour any other books by local writers that would normally go unnoticed this time of year.

Dreadful Paris by Melissa A. Thompson was a book that caught my eye when it was released last spring, but somehow slipped between the cracks of my summer reading list. To be fair, the book is so small that it could just have easily slipped between the cracks of my front porch. Barely the size of a small framed photograph, this is a book that seems to be doing its very best to defy the attention it deserves. At the same time, it’s a tiny gem of a novel that probably wouldn’t work if it aspired to be anything bigger or bolder than it is.

Set sometime around the here and now, Dreadful Paris tells the story of Ramona De Lottenville, the middle daughter of a matriarchal cosmetics “empire built on dermatalogical abrasion.” In case you didn’t notice how interesting it is that “that phrase moves in two directions at the same time,” Ramona is the kind of conversationalist who points that out. “I am the dull sister, the matte finish in a family of fine sparkling things,” and to her credit, she does at least know this.

To help her out, Ramona’s grandmother, Anka De Lottenville threatens to disinherit her from a substantial fortune unless she finds either something interesting to do with her life or a cherished family photograph that was stolen by one of Ramona’s friends when she was a teenager. She must move forward, or revisit the past. Being Ramona, she teeters between the two, vowing to develop “persistence of vision” while recording the details of her sad little life on page 78 of a café copy of Art in America.

Some people might call Ramona’s minimalist exercise an autobiography. Ramona prefers her grandmother’s words “orchestrating my own psychological landscape.” And indeed the notes Ramona keeps about her life read like the words of someone who has been spending way too much time with her way too smart grandmother. Like an adult installment of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Dreadful Paris reads like some kind of postmodern bedtime story for adult children.

Sophie Parkes is the former friend of Ramona’s who may or may not still have the picture that will release her. The Angelina Jolie to Ramona’s Winona Ryder, Sophie is a somewhat sociopathic mean girl whose destiny is nowhere near as grand as Ramona assumes it will be. The picture in question is a snapshot of Anka in a state of perfectly orchestrated ennui after having just missed a train to Turkey. “That picture documents precisely the last time that I was truly happy in my life.” On the back of the picture Anka has scrawled “Dreadful Paris.”

The weird pseudo-Victorian veneer of the prose is accented with hyper-detailed illustrations. Fans of the graphic short works of Tony Millionaire will love the painstaking decorative mutations of private school girls and fowl (yes, I mean birds: pigeons, ducks, swans etc.) There’s a kind of pleasant mustiness about the language and art that mellows the sharp wit Thompson uses to whip this teenage tale of fear and nostalgia down to size.

There’s way more style in this tiny novel than substance. But it’s high style and a very rare thing, a book that delivers what the dustcover promises: “a tale of private Mona Lisas, photographic decadence and, above all, distractions of the exquisite sort.”

Dreadful Paris by Melissa A. Thompson, Snare, pb, 121pp, $10