By Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer. Goose Lane Editions, 202 pp, $21.95, softcover.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is this year's Annabel Lyon: a writer of very fine short stories who is, at least temporarily, unable to write something longer.

In Kuitenbrouwer's case, the fine stories came in a collection called Way Up. The novel, The Nettle Spinner, is dissolute in a way that may be the result of a writer who's spent years trying to get the difficult arcs of shorter stories right not being able to extend them into a decent long narrative.

The Nettle Spinner is divided into several connected scenarios and time lines-like many novels by story writers-and the bits never come together; at least, not enough to make the imaginary bits involving a little man named Jake, a stowaway on the Titanic now living by himself and his wits in Northern Ontario, seem to matter enough for a reader to try to figure them out. They are, doubtless, metaphorically loaded, as befits a book based on weaving, tree planting, and turning nasty stinging nettle into beautiful but transitory cloth.

This novel is overcome by its metaphor-in fact, by its narrative? sacrificed to whatever meaning or resonance its author presumably hoped she was instilling it with. The book always seems to be working somewhere above itself, never bothering too much to get its act together on the page.

It's also hobbled by what I assume, given the strength of her previous writing, is intentionally overwrought prose. Sentences like "Oh, the smell of this, that smell that completed me" and "I walked as if in a dream that was all too real" fall too heavily and too frequently to make this a pleasant read. Whatever that intention might have been, it misfired.

By the end of this short book, the conflation of real and imagined-Kuitenbrouwer's tree planting, her baby, her imaginary Jake and the couple of real men he's based on-is not as fascinating, challenging, or enlightening as it is simply frustrating.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer reads from The Nettle Spinner on Friday (September 9) at Our Town Café (245 East Broadway). Novelists Timothy Taylor and Steven Galloway will read from forthcoming fiction.