BOOK REVIEW / MEMOIR : Paradise Lost, Regained and Researched : SPRING STREET SUMMER: The Search for a Lost Paradise <i> by Christopher Hudson</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf, $23, 272 pages

The most interesting memoirs tend to be chronicles of rebellion, in which writers, rather than predictably pontificating, struggle to affirm who they are by discovering who they are not. Rarely, though, has rebellion taken on symbolism as biblical in proportions as in these pages.

Christopher Hudson, a British journalist and novelist, began rebelling when he was sent 8,000 miles away from his beloved home in Uganda to live with his “mawkishly Protestant” grandparents.

The boy who would run barefoot with his friends under the frangipani trees and the warm African sun despaired at having to dress in a heavy gray flannel uniform, “plod along cold concrete pavements to a cold concrete school” and listen earnestly as his grandparents scolded him for incipient sinfulness.

Hudson escaped by becoming a devout secularist, speculating on why people such as his grandparents needed to believe in dogmatic religions. Taking an editing job at a respected British publisher, he began to study cultural representations of heaven and hell.

But the allure of this intellectual world faded one day when Hudson took Nilzete, a young woman he was ardently trying to impress, to a religion lecture his publisher held at the University of Kent. Hudson initially found himself absorbed in the lecture--cultural critic George Steiner argued that hell was more interesting than heaven because representations of Paradise, such as those religious brochures wherein cows meandered aimlessly with foxes by the river side, could only illustrate a kind of “suicidal contentment.”

Soon, though, Hudson noticed that the attention of the guests, “middle-aged men in sober apparel, their pin stripes cross-hatched by the curve of gold watch-chains across billowy waistcoats,” was fixated not on Steiner, but on Nilzete, a young Brazilian woman dressed in shocking pink, with a skirt that rode up to her thighs and “the kind of beauty which exploded in your face: large dark eyes, a wide mouth, adorable features set in perfect oval face, with lustrous hair and skin the color of Greek honey.”

Concluding that these intellectuals were probably just as repressed as his Protestant grandparents, Hudson, referring to his youthful self in the third person, begins to withdraw from their world: “There and then he vowed that he would prove Paradise was anything but boring; and that it was as much about bodily joy as about spiritual bliss. Every torment of hell, which had stirred the ghoulish imaginings of artists and writers across the centuries, he would match with a sensory pleasure which evoked the delights of paradise.”

Hudson makes good on his vow by taking a fellowship at UC Santa Cruz. He moves into a communal house on Spring Street where, one Sunday afternoon in late May, while working in its garden--framed by balconies of pink and white roses and set above a dark green ambuscade of fern and Tuscan pink rooftops near the pale blue ocean--he concludes that he has found Paradise.

The sun is hot and his three female housemates, who are working beside him, have taken off their clothes.

“Silently and seriously, Adam and three Eves scooped up the friable earth, as dry and fragrant as tobacco dust, into small soft mounds and pushed seedlings into them, pretending for a blissful hour that supermarkets selling packaged squash hadn’t been invented, and that this was the morning of the world.”

Suddenly, though, a plump brown snake appears out of the wild undergrowth and flickers its tongue. Hudson, whose grandparents’ biblical training taught him “what happens next,” shouts out a warning to his housemates. But they laugh reassuringly, insisting that “it’s only a gopher snake, it’s not poisonous.” Picking up the snake, they giggle in delight as it glides between their breasts, over their shoulders and down their backs.

But is it only a snake? The symbolic meaning of this question (Should Hudson accept this world as a genuine paradise? Can he freely partake of its delights without fear of being punished for his indulgence?) are at the heart of this innovative, elegant memoir.

Hudson eventually answers “no” to these questions, but it’s clear that “no” is the only answer he can allow himself to give. After five idyllic summers on Spring Street, Hudson decided to return to England, where he married and started a family. To answer anything but “no,” to admit that his bliss came from more than the mere “chemical interaction of youth and sunlight,” would be to call his current life into question.

And so when Hudson returns to Santa Cruz to track down his former housemates and research this book, he searches for dark corners in the house. He finds some--one of the women who would go naked, for example, did so less to get back to nature than to get back at her boyfriend. Most of his former housemates, however, sunnily insist that they were happier on Spring Street than at any time since.

Hudson thus has trouble explaining why he decided to leave Santa Cruz. He writes passionately of falling in love with Laura, a woman he met at UC Santa Cruz, for instance, but then dismisses his feelings with the cryptic comment: “In loving Laura, he felt that he had discovered his soul--but the price of keeping it would be to lose his freedom and stay in California.”

And yet, ultimately, it seems that Hudson was right to leave his Paradise. For he seems to have confused the sexual intimacy of the place with spiritual and psychological intimacy. In fact, he was quite closed with the women around him, as becomes apparent in his confusion about Laura, in his decision not to tell his adoring English girlfriend about his relationship with Laura and in his mild sexism: When he returns to Santa Cruz in 1989, for instance, he depicts the decline of the Spring Street house by pointing out that in its garden lay “a plump girl in an orange swimsuit. . . . If I had needed proof that time had moved on, it lay before me. . . .”

Hudson’s relationships with men during those Spring Street summers are equally immature. He idealizes the man who founded the house as “an intellectual Daniel Boone pitting his wits against the physical universe with as much confidence as the early settlers had pitted their strength against the Rocky mountains, looking for water and discovering gold.”

Nevertheless, while the grown-up Hudson researching this book is probably not as critical of his young self as he should be, he does acknowledge that his youthful search for Paradise was largely narcissistic. Quoting Freud’s notions on how our longing for Utopia really represents an egotistical wish to “return to the paradise of the womb,” Hudson ultimately comes full circle in this memoir, agreeing with George Steiner--and perhaps even with his grandparents--that good and evil are indispensable concepts.

“Lasting love isn’t something you build in gardens of Eden,” Hudson writes, “but in the wilderness beyond, with hard work and disappointments commingled with the marvelous things. Unchanging delight is as meaningless a notion as heaven without hell; happiness depends on contrast, and change.”