by JULIET WATERS

If only because Katherine Mansfield is the role Nicole Kidman was born to play, the hype in the Canadian publishing world surrounding Janice Kulyk Keefer's Thieves has some credibility.

If you loved A.S. Byatt's Possession or Michael Cunningham's The Hours, then odds are you'll love Thieves. If you considered Possession a guilty pleasure, but weren't blown away by Byatt's writing or are ambivalent about the idea of selling academic life as a highly refined version of tabloid journalism, you might not. If you'd rather be reading great writers than competently written novels based on their lives, wait for the movie. If, however, you're curious about Katherine Mansfield and you're the kind of reader who can appreciate a very Canadian, deceptively subtle novel of ideas, there's a good chance you might really like Thieves, even if you don't love it.

Mansfield, born in turn-of-the-century New Zealand, was one of the first modern short story writers to fuse prose and poetry. At the same time she led the kind of life that has created an impression of her as a sluttier, colonial version of Virginia Woolf. She left her first husband, pretty much the day after marrying him, for cellist Garnet Trowell. The relationship didn't last (Trowell is the lover who moved to Canada), and produced a miscarriage. Mansfield went on to write some of the most seminal short stories in the history of literature, not to mention women's literature, while living a life of relative promiscuity, until she died at 34 of complications from tuberculosis and VD.

Early in the novel, Keefer hints at the rivalry between Mansfield and Woolf when she introduces the contemporary character of Monty, a disillusioned New Zealand scholar. It's the mid-'80s and Monty is about to flunk out of his doctoral program because he hasn't been able to prove his thesis that Woolf stole from Mansfield the "technique for singling out and intensifying the small, seemingly shallow things in life - a woman combing her hair, a child playing with a bowl of porridge." Since this is now such a fundamental technique of poetry, it does seem a little like trying to prove that the second person who mixed blue and yellow "stole" green. But even if it's hard to respect Monty as an academic, the strange, sad relationship he has with his father, another scholar obsessed with Mansfield, offers some of the novel's strongest moments.

This hint that there is more to know about the rivalry between Woolf and Mansfield than what's already known (Woolf once admitted to envying Mansfield's writing and said snooty things about her personal hygiene) creates problems. The storyline is all but dropped. Given the status of these two writers, this is the equivalent, in the academic world, of advertizing a WWF naked catfight that never happens. People are bound to be disappointed. A subplot about the theft of Mansfield and Trowell's correspondence from a library in Windsor is interesting, but hardly as satisfying. On the plus side, Woolf's absence will at least make it easier for Kidman to play Mansfield without the use of fancy computer graphics pitting her against herself with and without nose.

The lack of compelling story line, however, is not my main criticism. The ceaseless drama of Mansfield's tangled life keeps the pages turning, which in a weird way is actually the novel's weakness. Too often Mansfield comes off as a spoilt drama queen instead of a writer one feels compelled to know more about. Mansfield and Woolf both changed women's literature by shifting focus from gothic stories, like secret lovers and terrible diseases, to more profound secrets, like the emptiness so many women found in the strict morality of domestic, middle-class life. Perhaps Mansfield did live the kind of tangled life that was the stuff of gothic fiction. The power of her stories made the tradition of plot-driven fiction relatively uninteresting. It still does.

Thieves by Janice Kulyk Keefer,
Harper Flamingo, hc, 303pp, $34.95