by JULIET WATERS

When Louise Kirk is nine her mother disappears, leaving this note: "I have gone. I am not coming back. Louise knows how to work the washing machine."

On the surface, Helen Grace Kirk is everything a 1950s housewife should be. She dresses her incurably geeky daughter in the latest fashions. She keeps an obsessively clean house, vacuuming not only the walls but the air. A former beauty queen, she looks like Grace Kelly and can organize the perfect charades party. She has only one obvious flaw, the squawking, dark laugh of a vicious swan. Her less-obvious flaw, until she leaves, is a chilling lack of empathy for her daughter.

The similarities and differences between Barbara Gowdy and the mother she creates for the narrator of her latest novel, The Romantic, are intriguing. Gowdy is sort of the Grace Kelly of Canadian fiction. Still gorgeous at 52, the only other Canadian blonde who could rival her for sexiest photo shoot in Saturday Night's March swimsuit issue was Pamela Sue Anderson. Back in the '90s, Gowdy was wearing micro mini suits to readings years before anyone had heard of Ally McBeal. But her sense of humour is as weird and dark as it comes. She's achieved international critical acclaim for her novels, The White Bone, Mister Sandman, and Falling Angels, but she may still be best known for writing the story that inspired the movie Kissed, the Canadian indie film that introduced Molly Parker as a necrophiliac who likes to sit on the faces of dead men.

Dark as her vision is, however, Gowdy has such acute empathy for her characters, her fiction can be almost unbearably painful. The Romantic is no exception. If it has a failing, it's that this time around she hasn't cushioned the pain with as much perverse quirkiness as her fans are used to.

By the time she's turned 10, Louise has fallen in love with her neighbour, Abel Richter. Abel would seem an obvious antidote to her mother's callousness. If her mother symbolizes the ideal, but flawed woman of the '50s, Abel is the ideal, but flawed boy of the '60s - a beautiful, self-destructive poet-musician. He has empathy to burn and is authentically incapable of a hurtful thought, let alone action. This is true whether he's dealing with the tyrannically needy Louise, or the popular kids who torment them both at school. He loves Louise desperately, as he loves everything. When Louise asks him if he loves her, he replies "too much." But he could just as well be talking about the baby bat they find one day as children. He loves so much that, ironically, he's a constant source of pain to anyone unfortunate enough to love him. He is incapable of self-interest, and as a result, incapable of action. To numb himself, he drifts into chronic alcoholism. We know from the outset that Louise will be abandoned by him. When The Romantic opens, she's 29 and has been grieving his death for three years.

Louise's tragic story of hopeless love is a beautiful novel, but an oddly traditional story for an author who is generally known for her bizarre scenarios. Nominated regularly for every literary award there is in Canada, Gowdy's never actually won anything. The Romantic may get her there this year, but it may also disappoint those readers who love her as much for her perversity as for her classic charm.

Still, whatever your taste, no one writes the blues like Gowdy. There couldn't be a writer more perfectly suited for the eclectic, unpredictable atmosphere of Blue Metropolis. Don't miss her.

The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy, HarperFlamingo, hc, 372pp, $38.95. Gowdy will be interviewed at Blue Metropolis by Joel Yanofsky today, April 3, 4pm, and will participate in the panels, "Where Do Stories Come From, "April 4, 4pm, and "Writing for Film," April 4, 7pm, all events $10