by JULIET WATERS

Frances Mackenzie, heroine of Patricia Pearson's first novel Playing House, has it relatively good in Manhattan. In her early 30s, she's a senior editor at a prestigious literary magazine, The Pithy Review, where she gets to clean up the mistakes of Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Ignatieff. She's managing to pay the rent on her one-room apartment, even if she is a hopeless slob. As she tells us, her new boyfriend, Calvin Puddie ("No. Pudhee. Or no, that doesn't look right - I think it could be Puhdey") is a Cape Breton-born jazz musician who has an annual salary "equivalent of two Smarties and a piece of string." But he's sweet and funny. Before inviting him into her apartment for the first time, she confesses, "I'm a mess." His response: "Yes. But you're a fine mess."

As a fellow Canadian, he understands how it feels to be treated in Manhattan as if "we were a nation of cheerful, unimportant people with Down's syndrome." But more importantly, he understands the rules of relationships in our generation: "Touch without faith, suppress all expressions of hope as bad manners. Do what we're doing, pretend that we're not." They haven't been pretending for very long when one morning she wakes up to discover that her breasts are heavier than her head. Later that day she barfs into a sweater display at the Gap. Clearly she's pregnant. And so begins this modern-day romance, an increasingly common tale of a couple trying to live a creative life with a little dignity and integrity, a goal increasingly incompatible with having kids. Before long they're living the contemporary version of an arranged marriage: a relationship dictated by fate, chaotic lives and faulty birth control.

Overlook a lame cover, evidently designed to exploit the recent popularity of mumlit, and you'll discover a sharp satire of love, life and Canada. Stranded in her hometown of Toronto after she makes an unfortunate joke about wielding explosives, Frannie finds she has even more to contend with than no money and forced dependency on her family. She and Calvin come from vastly different backgrounds. The Mackenzies are upstanding Toronto WASPs who treat Frannie's situation with a brusque condescension. At the same time, Frannie, who's been living in Manhattan for close to a decade, is finding it hard to abandon her own condescension in a town where she feels like a "Sneetch with a star etched upon my belly." The solution arrived on is to hit the road to Cape Breton, which she imagines as a life rich with simple, poetic complexity. Calvin, who comes from a family of coal miners in a town where the mines have been shut down, tries to prepare her for the reality. His hometown is more of a simple shithole, where everyone is poetically unemployed and drunk. The only thing keeping this relationship together, barely, is Lester, their infant son, named as a compromise between Frannie's WASPish sensibilities and Calvin's insistence that he be named after a famous musician.

Anyone who knows Patricia Pearson will understand this as a little insider joke, a nod to her prime minister grandfather. Pearson has clearly drawn from life experience. She did time in Manhattan as a crime reporter where she won an Arthur Ellis Award for her book on female criminals, When She Was Bad. She has impeccable Canadian-WASP credentials (her mother is Senator Landon Pearson.) And according to a column she wrote for the National Post (which she quit last spring to protest their anti-liberal bullying), she is a hopeless slob.

Playing House, however, feels much more like a novel than autobiography. The pacing sometimes suffers from the columnist in Pearson trying to stuff in one clever quip too many, but refreshingly there's no political agenda pro or con women procrastinating childbearing. All the suffering and all the joy is there. These are fully realized characters in what often feels like a half-realized culture. And I'm not talking about Canada, I'm talking about family.

Playing House by Patricia Pearson,
Random House, hc, 282pp, $34.95