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Times Staff Writer

“My book is puerile,” Carol Mavor writes, “a depreciative term meaning merely boyish. But, for me, the merely blossoms as full, fulfilling, full-mouthed, full-hearted, fulgurant, and fulgent, without shame. Brought to its fullcome, my book boyishly strives to be betwixt and between not only boy and man, gay and straight, Mama’s boy and father’s spitting image (well, you know the list), but most decidedly novel and philosophy.”

“Reading Boyishly” is “a labor of love for four boyish men and one boy.” These are: J.M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D.W. Winnicott and the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (Mavor is specifically interested in the photographs Lartigue took as a boy). “They are neither man nor boy, neither little nor big: They are boyish . . . some more, some less, some very.”

Mavor, sexy den mother, takes us on a playful ramble through the work of these writers and the evocative “boy-ogle” photographs of Lartigue, which, along with Joseph Cornell assemblages, “unbelievably stylish small dogs” and the occasional painting of Virgin and child, illustrate the book. Proudly, Mavor aligns herself with the new hedonists who read and write as much for the sensual experience as for the meaning: “I have an appetite for Barthes who had an appetite for Proust.”

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It is a sigh of relief, this book, a defense of things that make us feel guilty: nostalgia, apron strings, the “good-enough mother,” the lost mother, the nest, the childhood home, the beauty of boys at play. It is a defense of adolescence: “The adolescent has time. The adolescent, perhaps, is the one who in actuality does not waste his time, but simply takes his time.”

She writes of flying as a pre-Oedipal expression of freedom and “oceanic space” in Barrie’s “Peter Pan”; boys and birds and “aeroplanes” in Lartigue’s photographs; “The Little Prince”; the memories of the nest in Proust and his constant struggle for breath (as an asthmatic and a writer). Food and kissing, eating and not eating, boredom and tenderness -- Mavor’s is a style to be savored: “By bowering within flown-distant mother-wings, Proust, Barthes, and Barrie inverted the restless hands of Father Time.” There is a conspicuous absence of fathers in “Reading Boyishly.” Why? Because “he usually, if only in the most stereotypical way, stands in the way of making boys boyish.”

Sentences often fly down the pages in mouse-tail formations. Blue type highlights pointed thoughts: “I hope,” Mavor writes in blue, opposite photos by Lartigue of a boy jumping, “. . . that my book is not a rock in place of an egg . . . but rather, a sky-high vision of birds flown from the nest . . . like boys in the air.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com

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