THE LETO BUNDLEBy Marina WarnerFarrar, Straus &...

THE LETO BUNDLE

By Marina Warner

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

408 pp., $26

All too often, the weary author leans heavily on the plot, the infrastructure of a novel. The plot gives structure and momentum to the story, but the story is more than the sum of the novel’s parts: plot, characters, language. The story is all that is uncontrollable and controllable about writing. The story lives in the author’s imagination, a whirling combination of fact, inspiration and fantasy that sometimes disobeys its creator.

Marina Warner did not cower in the face of her complicated story, though in parts she is clearly daunted by it. A middle-aged museum curator, Hetty, is put in charge of a sarcophagus that contains no body, only bits of manuscript, amulets, shards and scraps of cloth, with an 1,800-year-old cartouche that depicts a beautiful woman, about 28 years old. These fragments, known as the Leto bundle, inspire a group of followers, led by a young man, Kim, a visionary whose medium is the Web, to start a movement called History Begins With Us.

Leto is the name of a Greek goddess who, in legend, is raped by Zeus and gives birth to twins: Apollo and Artemis. Abandoned by Zeus, they take shelter for three years with wolves. Leto does not die. She lives through the ages to the present in several incarnations (each with different names): as a stowaway on a ship, as a slave and as a cleaning lady in a war-torn modern-day city.

The story weaves around the fragments in the sarcophagus (there is no body because she is immortal), as the curator and the visionary try to piece Leto’s story together. Warner reveals more the pagan heart than the statuesque classicism of the ancient Greek gods. Some of the novel is told in e-mails between Kim and Hetty, a form that is much less compelling than Warner’s storytelling. “The Leto Bundle” is a novel as ambitious and thrilling as Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits” in its weaving of the past and the present, intuition and academia, fact and fantasy.

*

SMALL WONDER

Essays

By Barbara Kingsolver

HarperCollins: 270 pp., $23.95

“Small changes, small wonders--these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life,” explains Barbara Kingsolver in the title essay of this collection. “It’s a workable economy.” In the tradition of Wendell Berry and all those who went before him, from Scott Nearing to E.F. Schumacher, Kingsolver describes and defends a way of life, her way of life, that she believes can give us all that is missing--spiritually, physiologically and economically--from modern-day life and, in the process, slow the destruction of the Earth. “I invest my heart’s desire and the work of my hands in things that will outlive me,” she writes of writing, gardening and child-rearing. She describes some of the choices involved, living in a sustainable manner that is respectful of and closer to nature: from her daughter’s choice not to move a hermit crab from a beautiful shell she finds on the beach to the difficulty of eating animals without ever looking them in the eye.

In the essays written after Sept. 11, Kingsolver describes America as the world’s “Fat Brother,” full of “prideful wastefulness.” She writes of issues such as preserving genetic diversity and of the importance of scientific literacy to the environmental movement. She writes a letter to her mother and one to her 13-year-old daughter. She writes about writing: stories versus novels, poetry versus fiction and the joy of writing about sex. She writes about her two homes: in a hollow in southern Appalachia and in a bosque in Arizona. Luckily, from time to time, she makes fun of her own tendency to preach. Humor and earnestness can be found here.

*

ALCOHOL

The World’s Favorite Drug

By Griffith Edwards

St. Martin’s Press: 230 pp., $23.95

“Alcohol” is a book with a message: Alcohol is a dangerous drug. Griffith Edwards moves quickly from molecules to morals, describing everything from the chemical composition of alcohol, to its many uses throughout history, to the laws created to control it, the realization in the medical community that alcoholism is a disease and the institutions created to help those suffering from that disease. He considers the links between alcohol and breast cancer and cirrhosis of the liver, but spends too little time on current research. He is more interested in preventing the abuse of alcohol: “Society needs to put in place a range of external measures to support healthy drinking choices and to make excess less likely,” he writes. But coming at the end of such a brief history of man’s efforts to control this particular addiction, this warning seems a bit feeble. One is more struck by our need for escape from reality than by our choice of poison.