Reinventing ourselves, through fact and fable

By Caroline Leavitt, 2/8/2004

Can reading really alter your life? Can you credit -- or blame -- a particular book for urging you to quit your dead-end job, or fall heedlessly in love, or pack your bags to start a fresh new life in Tobago?

J. Peder Zane, the book-review editor of The Raleigh News & Observer, thinks so, and he charged 34 literary luminaries including Margot Livesey and Peter Cameron to contemplate that very question, asking each writer to focus on the one book that was the most daunting or dangerous or tempting -- or any adjective that might prove that reading is far more transformative voyage than passive pleasure. The results, first published in the News & Observer, are collected in the absolutely superlative ''Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading" (Norton, paperback, $15.95).

There's Charles Frazier, so taken by Antonin Artaud's descriptions of Mexico's canyon country in ''The Tarahumara" that he trekked 2,500 miles to see and experience the land for himself. Marianne Gingher revered Eudora Welty's book ''The Robber Bridegroom" so much that she summoned up courage and risked being fired in order to crash a faculty party and meet her idol. And Zane, who was practicing youthful hipness as a way to belong, got a nudge from Freud's ''Civilization and Its Discontents" that the hippest thing he could really do was to silence the roar of the crowd, question everything, and go it alone.

One of my favorite of the essays is Joan Barfoot's ''The Maddest Book I Read," about the perilous power of books. Barfoot begins with some youthful, romantic notions about insanity. Madness, for her, was a siren song, promising a glittering, heightened awareness that was irresistible. Being crazy was a creative act, a way to strip yourself down to your essential core, and if Barfoot couldn't go mad herself, she could have secondhand experience of it by immersing herself in Doris Lessing's ''discombobulating" masterpiece, ''The Golden Notebook." Lessing's book gave her Anna, a heroine teetering into breakdown, and also ''a fevered contact high" she craved. Barfoot reread it every year, right up until she took in a schizophrenic friend. Unlike the intense, almost wonderful madness in ''The Golden Notebook," that of Barfoot's friend was harrowing to be around. ''Pain spoken and shared" wasn't healing the way it was in the novel -- it was so contagious that Barfoot began to question her own sanity. Shattering yourself in order to put yourself back together might work in fiction, but here, in Barfoot's kitchen, it seemed far too dangerous. ''Even brave, wise, magnificent novels cannot be, should not be, are not intended to be recipe books," Barfoot writes, and she pries herself from the printed page and asks her friend to leave.

Crafting your reality from the true experiences of another is one thing, but what if you're raised to believe that fairy tales are not only true, but your birthright? Laurie Fox's ingenious novel ''The Lost Girls" (Simon & Schuster, $23) introduces us to four generations of Darling women, descended from the original Wendy. Each is said to be visited in girlhood by Peter Pan, whisked off to Neverland to fall in unrequited love, only to be set back adrift in the real world. They're lost girls who can't settle for plain old reality and go mad trying.

Is the problem that these women are ''barking mad"? Or is it that they need to mesh the fantastical elements of their lives with the real ones? Certainly a bit of the fairy tale leaks into their lives. After all, Wendy Darling Braverman, great-granddaughter of the original Wendy, is married to a Peter Pan-ish sort of man, who can't muster up energy to look for a job. And her mother, deserted by an airline tycoon, pens self-help books on the Pan syndrome, trying to nail it down and cure it. But it's not until Wendy's rebellious daughter Berry has her own encounter with Peter, a meeting that ends with her a lost girl in a mental ward, that Wendy has to reexamine the tale and rewrite her own ending.

The conceit of the book is deliciously original, rendered with the tart, modern spin of a fractured fairy tale. Pirates are lost boys who forgot their pledge to never grow up and, finding they have, tend to get a bit peevish. Mermaids don't really drown the men they've lured out to sea. Instead, the men are too humiliated and overwhelmed by the lusty encounters to swim back to their ships and so give themselves up to ocean depths.

I was having so much fun reading that I forgave the book some of its sins. There's a certain heavy-handedness in spelling out its message, a bit of overwrought writing, and a Peter as insubstantial as his shadow, who doesn't make much of a case for five generations of women falling helplessly in love with him.

So is this particular Peter Pan real or a figment of maddened imaginations? Ultimately, that question doesn't matter. Not to me, because the book's flirtation with reality vs. story is so much fun. And not to the Darling women, because it's the legend, the story that became the rudder steering their lives. And to soar above it, while still understanding and embracing its power, takes a kind of magic more powerful than any of Peter's pixie dust.

So can books change our lives? According to these two terrific books, the answer is absolutely. Thrillingly. And sometimes, if you're very lucky, happily ever after.

Caroline Leavitt's new novel is ''Girls in Trouble."