Sugar's sweet

By JIM BARTLEY
Saturday, November 20, 2004 - Page D14

A Girl Like Sugar
By Emily Pohl-Weary
McGilligan Books, 324 pages, $24.95

When twentysomething Sugar loses her rock-star boyfriend to a fatal drug binge, her balm is a mini binge of her own: potato chips, chocolate cake and continuous reruns of ER and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Emily Pohl-Weary's debut novel plunges us into the furtive mechanisms of grief, then takes us on a convincingly circuitous trek through the thickets of family and friendship toward Sugar's renewal.

Sugar's sweetheart, Marco, barely out of high school, took a headlong tumble into fame. While a drug-dealing friend kept him wired up for the celebrity mill, Sugar quietly held the fort in their Toronto apartment, staying sane on his behalf -- until his desperate neediness drove her out just a few months before his death.

Stranded now between surges of sorrow, guilt and anger, Sugar is further stressed by a New Agey mom whose every phone call discounts her grief with bossy advice. A job shelving CDs at Record Teen returns Sugar nominally to the functional world. Harassed by a lecherous boss, she screws up her courage and quits, then lands a TV internship: poodle maintenance for a preening producer.

Meanwhile, she tries to free herself from Marco's ghost. He visits her most nights in the wee hours, hashing over old times and making sure she feels guilty for any straying affection.

Struggling to break Marco's spectral bonds, she finds her erotic compass wavering. At a babysitting job, she discovers a stash of porn mags and masturbates to the images of "fake blondes" with "dry and flower-like" vaginas. Clubbing with a co-worker, it occurs to her that they probably look like a lesbian couple. Then Janet leans in on the dance floor and plants a drunken kiss. "We were stuck together, lips against lips, tasting. . . . I knew if we kissed again it would mean something." Then come rumours that her mom has been spotted dancing with a woman at a Church Street bar.

Pohl-Weary ups the carnal speculation with Sugar's move from her basement apartment to a house-share with Janet and a lesbian named Plum. Thomas, a filmmaker and anti-poverty activist, arrives in time to trigger an affirming (and wonderfully explicit) tumble with Sugar in her new bed. Far from easing her erotic angst, the fabulous sex makes her bolt. For weeks, she gives Thomas the cold shoulder, knowing deeply that she's hooked.

Events snowball. Police and activists clash at an anti-poverty protest; Sugar's best friend conceives a child with Marco's old drug-dealer buddy; Thomas shows saintly patience in the face of Sugar's waffling. Despite a few needless diversions along the way, Pohl-Weary deftly marshals her youthful passions and follies in the service of a quietly redemptive, unsentimental finale.

Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.