The Story Becomes Your Own : FIRST NIGHTS, <i> By Susan Fromberg Schaeffer (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 636 pp.)</i>

“When your life begins,” says Anders Esterso, the fictional compiler (but in no real sense narrator) of Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s new novel “First Nights,” “in those first years when everything is most important, the individual memory fails, and so you rely on what you are told. You are only a character in someone else’s story. You are the main character, every event concerns you, but the story is not yours. You cannot tell it. It is only later, when you come to count the cost, when you have grown old and have time to look back, when it is too late to change anything: then you become the storyteller. Perhaps that is the moment you are truly born.”

“First Nights” is the story of two women: Anna Asta, (a fictionalized Greta Garbo), a child of the frozen Scandinavian landscape who is rescued from grinding poverty and transformed into the brightest star of the silent screen; and Ivy Cook, Anna’s maid, child of tropical Green Island, a place of sunshine, sky and sea, of wild, green-skinned oranges, of spirits and spells and a nanny named Miss Blue the Story Tailor, who, with a nip here and a tuck there could change the story of your life.

In many ways the women are opposites. Anna is white, Ivy black; Anna rich, Ivy poor. Anna was, for a time, the most famous woman in the world, while Ivy led what Anna jealously (but mistakenly) calls a normal life. Ivy turns hardship into lessons and inspiration, while for Anna, what was measured once as success has become disillusionment. (“I chew on my cornmeal cake,” says Anna, “and think: This is what it comes to. You become famous. You become rich. Everyone knows you. And what makes you happy? Sitting in your chair watching snow. Dusting your china dogs.”) Anna is cynical, subdued and so maudlin she can become tiresome, while Ivy is energetic, ebullient, full of the life energy that Anna calculatingly avoids.

Of course the women are also in many ways the same, bound together by two lifetimes of joy and tragedy and their need to tell each other the stories of their lives. Ivy uses narrative to search for her lost mother, while Anna searches for her lost father, her lost lovers and ultimately her lost child. Memories of incest hang over both these women’s stories like shadowy shrouds, never coalescing, taking responsibility for some (but by no means all) of their sadness and a little of their passion.

Anna’s and Ivy’s voices, strong and distinct, alternate throughout the book, as do the different storytelling strategies they employ. (Anna says she is more confused than Ivy, which is not the same as being more complicated.) This alternation becomes both the rhythm and the cadence of the novel, the pulse that drives it through more than 600 pages of parallel wandering, as both women look for a thread of a story they can own.

The worlds these women inhabit have offered them storytelling models, but both women reject them as being too simple and too neat. “The childhood stories of my elders,” says Ivy, “were circles, beautiful things, sometimes frightening, but in the end like bright glass bracelets I could wear on my wrists. But (then) the stories become mine and the skein of thread spills from the spindle and tangles and assumes fantastic shapes on the floor.”

Anna’s unsatisfactory models were the simplified circles created in each of her films. “I ask you. What kind of world is this, where you make films and become other people and live out their stories in their worlds and even then you can’t have a happy ending?”

“First Nights” is really about separating what lasts (film, photographs, memory), from what does not (parents, husbands, beauty, love). But then the films rot from sitting too long in their canisters and the photographs blow away in a Green Island storm, and memory becomes the past’s only stronghold. “The happy do not need memory,” Ivy says, “but the unhappy . . . without memory, without a story of their lives they can only suffer like dumb dogs in the sun.”

Among the strongest memories are the ones of landscape: for Anna, Stockholm’s snowy, bitter quiet; for Ivy, the physical and metaphysical paradise called Green Island. “This is where Green Island ends says the woman, but I think, no, this is where the water begins. There is no end to Green Island.”

There are moments when the novel, in an attempt to represent the spirographic chaos that is the fabric of these women’s lives, becomes repetitive, at once predictable and out of control; moments when I believed “First Nights” could have been 100 pages shorter and at least equally successful.

But this book succeeds on so many levels: It is so honest and wise, and what it takes on is so huge and all encompassing that I am more than willing to indulge the author’s excess. “First Nights” dances, strong and gracefully, on the philosophical boundaries between words and silence (“A country where you cannot speak the language,” says Anna, “that is the landscape of nightmares . . . “), between art and life, between expectation and eventuality, between dreams and real life (“Why,” says Anna, “is it never as you dream it will be . . . “). In First Nights, Schaeffer examines the redemptive and imprecise nature of storytelling with as much patience for its complexity as any American writer.

Continuously self-referential, but never at its own expense, “First Nights” is the story of two women who, after giving up all hope of finding the lost parts of themselves, find happiness in each other and the life they learn to share.

“Are our stories ghosts possessing us?” Ivy asks. “Or are we ghosts, existing to harbor these stories and give them a home?” To the lover of rich fiction it makes no difference.

“What I feel is sadness,” says Ivy, finally. “What I search for is my story.”