by JULIET WATERS

According to Smithsonian Magazine Online, "Few other artists in the history of 20th-century American art have received such praise and nearly equal condemnation as Rockwell Kent." The native New Yorker lived in places as far away from the art world as Greenland and Newfoundland, back when it could be described as "a small island country off the coast of Canada." But few would label Kent a recluse. His socialist politics, probably more than his hyper-stylized landscapes, prompted enough media attention throughout his life that a 1937 issue of The New Yorker once quipped, "That day will mark a precedent which brings no news of Rockwell Kent."

At some point this year someone might very well quip something similar about Michael Winter, author of The Big Why, a novel loosely based on Kent's eventful years living in Brigus, Newfoundland. Of course with modern technology, no writer needs to create controversy to be read about daily. Winter's publisher recently set up a blog for Winter to keep us posted on life before and during his upcoming book tour (www.anansi.ca). But even without the blog, and the hype that recently tagged Winter as one of Toronto's "It Writers," devotees of cutting-edge Can lit won't have to search far for news. A scene in The Big Why that sends a legendary arctic explorer, Captain Bob Bartlett, into an early 20th-century S&M gay bar in New York, guarantees at least a little controversy.

Winter's first novel, This All Happened, published a few years ago, established him as an accessible Newfoundland postmodernist. In two previous short story collections he followed the coming-of-age of writer Gabriel English. This All Happened is the novel Gabriel was writing in Winter's second collection, One Good Last Look. If this isn't self-referential enough, the second novel Gabriel is working on is a historical novel set in Newfoundland. Poetic, contrived, honest, funny, if cerebral, Winter's distinctive voice reads a little like Michael Ondaatje if he were attempting Bridget Jones. His beautiful writing but incessant concern with de-constructing masculinity manages to be impressive, irritating and endearing all at once.

Read The Big Why and then take a look at Rockwell Kent's paintings and the attraction the painter holds for the writer will be no surprise. Kent's hyper-stylized, intensely bright but paradoxically bucolic landscapes evoke a mood strikingly similar to this novel. Similarities aside, Rockwell Kent's life is great material for fiction. He had a Hemingway-esque lust for travel, women and paring things down to the basic elements. His years in Newfoundland established a close relationship with Bartlett, one of the great navigators of the era. The drama of The Big Why is anchored largely in the tension between Kent and his long-suffering wife, Kathleen, as he fathers two children by other women. The story is moved along tangentially by a plot in which a small community, put off by Kent's self-absorbed American arrogance, sows the seeds of suspicion that lead to his deportation from Canada as a suspected spy.

Winter has written what can now safely be called an old-fashioned postmodern novel. There's no pretence that the man writing this fictional journal is really anyone other than Michael Winter. Even if you haven't read his first three books, you only have to read a few entries in his blog to confirm whose voice this is. But themes that might feel a little dated these days are given a nice vintage appeal when confined to the language and psychology of this era. Even the graphic sex that routinely peppers the narrative has an almost quaint subversiveness.

This, however, may not be the view shared by the defenders of Bob Bartlett's historical legacy. In the end, praise for Winter's novel will probably far outweigh condemnation. But if he's lucky, maybe he'll pull off that rare artistic victory of inspiring, strong, but equal measures of both.

The Big Why by Michael Winter, Anansi, hc, 384pp, $37.95