Inviting and allusive trips to Neverland

SOME novels grab you from the first page; you begin insisting on quoting line after line to anyone who will listen. Then there are those very few novels that make you quiet, selfish even, and quoting from them begins to seem a violation of the book’s wondrous delight. You feel a growing dismay as the number of pages remaining dwindles. “Kensington Gardens,” the first of Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresan’s 10 books to be translated into English, is one of these rare, exhilarating and hypnotic novels.

The opening lines dare you to read on: “It begins with a boy who was never a man and ends with a man who was never a boy. Something like that. Or better: it begins with a man’s suicide and a boy’s death, and ends with a boy’s death and a man’s suicide. Or with various deaths and various suicides at varying ages. I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter.”

The inviting, insinuating voice is that of Peter Hook, the child of drug-addled, eccentric, rich 1960s English rock star wannabes who are friends of or acquainted with the famous and the obscure.

Hook’s life and his family’s fate mirrors in more ways than one the life of writer J.M. Barrie and the lives of the boy then man, Peter Llewelyn Davies, who was the inspiration for the timeless Peter Pan.

Hook has witnessed many disturbing and memorable events, both imagined and real, including his mother’s friend Bob Dylan showing up in the middle of the night in his bedroom during a party at Neverland, the family’s English mansion, and vomiting all over his “neatly arrayed collection of lead soldiers.”

Now an adult, Hook is the incredibly successful author of a series of children’s books about a time-traveling boy named Jim Yang. At Neverland, Hook imprisons actor Keiko Kai, who has starred as Jim Yang in the many films made from Hook’s books. During the course of the novel, one tantalizing image succeeds another in an artful blending of the real and imaginary. “I tune into that night -- memories don’t come back to you, you go back to them,” Hook explains.

In one of his many elaborations upon reality, Hook tells Kai of hearing shots near the Dakota apartments in New York and being the one to identify the murdered John Lennon. This in turn gives rise to startling riffs on the Lennon song “Imagine,” which Hook calls a “universal hymn of pacifists, who -- out of laziness -- can’t imagine the existence of something called war. Backed by the melody of an almost somnambulistic piano, ‘Imagine’ urges us to give up everything, and, as part of that everything, ourselves.”

Then in one of his books, Hook has his boy hero Jim Yang rescue Lennon from assassination only to have the songwriter die of a broken neck after slipping in a bathtub.

Hook mentions the movie “Finding Neverland” and memories of childhood viewings of various versions of “Peter Pan,” but author Fresan cleverly asserts the superiority of the written word when Hook observes that “the tyrannical bond between film and spectator will never match the democratic nexus of book and reader; someone else wrote the book, true, but it’s you who read the story and set the pace and the mood as you turn the pages.”

Long, deliriously luxuriant and gossipy sections of novel re-create a grand ‘60s party where everyone of importance is present. It is as if Fresan has animated the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” but with a scrupulous eye: “Samuel Beckett (he looks like a murderer who must also be a butler).... Truman Capote (that voice like fingernails on a blackboard singing some song from the ‘The Mikado’ over and over again) .... Philip Larkin (thinking-saying-writing-reciting his ‘Never such innocence again’ poem).”

Fresan trusts his readers to follow his sinuous, allusive prose. In his hands, death and suicide are never morbid or nearly pornographic as on TV or in drearily familiar novels; they are simply part of a life made risky by imagination. Hook mentions at one point that he is not the Peter Hook from the band Joy Division. The reader is supposed to get the allusion to that band’s late lead singer, Ian Curtis, who had a great and enduring hit song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” That is exactly what “Kensington Gardens” does: Tear you apart, tear up your ideas about what a novel can do and send you again and again to mythic Neverland.

This reviewer has a confession to make: I have not read the last three pages of “Kensington Gardens” because I cannot bear the thought of finishing it. I could reread the novel, of course, but I want to delay its central idea, the terrible knowledge that childhood must come to an end. And so I make a little gesture against this dire inevitability.

Thomas McGonigle is the author of “Going to Patchogue” and “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov.”