by JULIET WATERS

Giselle Vasco is a gorgeous 22-year-old med student, a chronic anorexic and one of two narrators in Skinny, Montreal writer Ibi Kaslik's first novel. In group therapy one day, things start going, as one character puts it, "the Sylvia Plath way." Discussion turns to fathers.

"My father had such high expectations of me, my father wanted me to be the perfect little girl, blah, blah, fucking blah." But Giselle can't help but be drawn to Plath, "the patron saint of anorexics and electra-complexed women everywhere... I've always sort of liked her poetry. It's not often you read someone's words, and their pain, which has been dead for decades, lives on to give you a headache. I think there's something to be said for that."

There's a lot to be said for Plath, a writer whose reputation has probably suffered more than it has gained from her status as an undergraduate cult figure. Comparisons between Plath and Kaslik are inevitable, but should be taken as a compliment. More often than not, novels in this relentless, melancholic vein are unendurable for anyone over the age of 25. Skinny, however, is arguably one of the most elegant, beautifully written novels about female self-immolation to come out in a long time. That is, until its final chapters, where it starts to fall apart in a way so irrational and preventable that it's almost like watching a novelist do to her book what her narrator is doing to her body.

Skinny is a story about two sisters, one who thrives while the other wastes away. While Giselle is suffering though anorexia, her 14-year-old sister and co-narrator Holly is becoming a track and field star. Both are traumatized by the early death of their father, a gorgeous Hungarian doctor who we meet on the first page "shirtless and smoking a cigarette. Muscles flickered in his dark back in sculpted waves as he turned around to accept slices of pear from Mom."

In these first paragraphs hints of some kind of disturbing but illicitly delicious emotional incest drop gracefully, like fruit from a tree. It's a little obvious, but Kaslik's rendering of a sensual, gorgeous family haunted by a mysterious emptiness rings true more often than not. Her confident voice, the authentic concern Kaslik obviously has for her characters and the work she's put into creating this complex emotional territory create a solid expectation that the writer is heading toward some kind of intelligent resolution.

And then she veers onto a bizarro tangent involving a mysterious, complicated disease and medical expertise and technology that is clearly way over her head. Readers who prefer to take the risk of finding out what happens on their own may want to stop reading this review now. Readers who know nothing about epilepsy and want the chance to savour some of the fine writing that Kaslik spoils with a silly, improbable scenario, may want to save this review to read after.

Maybe Kaslik couldn't resist the sexy resonance of young women being tortured with electrodes. Electroshock therapy not being as common as it was back in the Bell Jar days, Kaslik comes up with some more contemporary technology - EEGs, the harmless, if tedious, test commonly used to diagnose epilepsy. To make this scenario work Kaslik has to fabricate facts about epilepsy (that it's genetic, which it is in only a fraction of cases) and imagine a grossly incompetent doctor who might attempt to establish paternity with EEG tests, in a case where he could easily establish it with a blood test. One has only to go to the book's acknowledgments and see the only source Kaslik lists for her research, epilepsy.com, to diagnose the problem: research anorexia.

Sadly, without the facts it desperately needs to maintain credibility, Kaslik leaves her first novel little choice but to go the Sylvia Plath way. Hopefully with her next one, Kaslik will find her own.

Skinny by Ibi Kaslik, HarperCollins, pb, 245pp, $19.95