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mister sandman | BY BARBARA GOWDY Steerforth Press, 268 pages the jacket copy for the Canadian novelist Barbara Gowdy's "Mister Sandman" calls it "a modern-day parable," and unfortunately, it is. I'm not a big fan of the grotesque mixed with the whimsical, especially when strangeness is used to gussy up a tale that only adds up to quaint homilies about the healing power of love and acceptance. "Mister Sandman" comes to the States with extraordinary praise, however. Margaret Atwood picked it as one of the "books of the year" in the Times Literary Supplement, and the current, controversial film "Kissed" is based on a Gowdy short story. Gowdy's heroine is the pixie-sized idiot savant Joan. Brain-damaged as a result of being dropped at birth, Joan, who doesn't speak but communicates through an array of echolalic sounds, is a piano prodigy, a voracious reader, a maker of experimental sound collages and Gowdy's compact little plot device. Stowed away in the closet where she prefers to spend her days, she's the repository of the family secrets. She knows that both her parents are gay (though closeted), and is aware of her older sister Marcy's prodigious love life. She even has a secret herself: She's actually the daughter of her eldest "sister," Sonja, but she's passed off as the child of Doris, her grandmother. Gowdy's greatest asset is that she's not fazed by weirdness. Early on, Doris hatches a scheme to get the money for Sonja's pregnancy by appearing on the '50s sob-sister sweepstakes "Queen for a Day" and telling a story to beat them all. Of the other contestants waiting to go on the show, Gowdy writes, "Either they were world class impostors, every one of them, or [Doris] shouldn't be there. She joined the line anyway. A long wait on hot pavement during which she thought of the men on the Titanic who had dressed up in turbans and fake stoles and too-small pointy high heels ..." Gowdy isn't a faker like Doris. She genuinely seems to see the world in deeply weird terms that she takes on faith. But that doesn't stop her brand of weirdness from veering perilously close to the John Irving variety, lying in wait to spring its conventional meaning on us. It's a crookedly stitched sampler proclaiming, to borrow a phrase from Inspector Clouseau, "It's all a part of life's rich pageant." April 1, 1997 -- Charles Taylor Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html