In which a 13-year-old learns, teaches wisdom

Francine Prose says that Nico, the central character in her new novel

Goldengrove

, is urgently in need of wisdom.

Nico, 13, doesn't know it, but she's about to be plunged into loss and suffering, and their manifold attacks on identity. She must handle these challenges on her own - and how she responds will be a measure of her character, and of her ability to heal.

"It occurred to me very early on that this is a book for adults even though the narrator is a 13-year-old girl," says Prose, by phone from her country home in Upstate New York. "You can't dumb down language for an adolescent like Nico. Her use of language is what is important about her. . . .

"Even though a novel is very intense and focused on the present, I realized I was writing about the past as well as about the present, and teens don't really have a past. So that made it for adults, too."

Prose, who will read from

Goldengrove

at the Free Library on Thursday, is the author of 21 books, including a dozen novels, and president of the PEN American Center. Her career is best characterized as a series of bold and unexpected moves, in tone, topic and audience.

Her 1981 novel

Household Saints

(made into a fine 1993 movie) was a matrilineal family saga of three generations of women in an Italian American family.

Blue Angel

(2001) was a satire on sexual harassment in college.

A Changed Man

(2005) skewered both neo-Nazi skinheads and the righteous liberals who decry them.

And

Goldengrove

is a book about kids for adults and vice versa, a clear-eyed look at loss and healing - and old movies, and art, and books, and a memorable version of "My Funny Valentine."

Set in the New York state Prose has visited before, it seems idyllic at first take: an idiosyncratic family living on a lake upstate, two loving sisters, a dad who runs a bookstore, and a mom who practices piano in the parlor. But idylls are made to be disrupted.

Prose says writing

Goldengrove

was "a maddening juggling act." And she does juggle many a gleaming sword in the book: adult reader/adolescent narrator; raw emotion/lyricism; tragedy/humor.

The book's main feature - a 13-year-old girl as narrator - is a risk in itself. But Nico's world is rich, thanks to her ex-hippie parents and her flamboyant, passionate sister, Margaret. And Nico possesses, on top of a teenager's painful self-consciousness, a sharp, ironic wit, and the open eyes of an aspiring scientist.

"She's a very sensible, smart girl," Prose says, "in a situation that would tax the good sense of even the smartest adult."

With loss come grief and anger. "I wanted the raw emotion," Prose says. Creating a narrator who speaks honestly and directly made for a very painful writing process. "I felt every day as if I was opening a vein when I sat down and wrote," Prose says. "While writing it, I said to my husband: 'Didn't I use to have

fun

writing before?' Parts of it were so hard."

As in many of her books, Prose employs a comic countercurrent - humane, worldly, even snarky - to treat topics (in this case, death and grief) you wouldn't think would be appropriate for comedy.

Especially poignant is the comedy of advice. Nico says: "A surprising number [of people] told me not to make any important decisions for a year. At least a year. They were forgetting that I was thirteen. What life-changing choices did they think my parents would let me make? I couldn't decide what T-shirt to wear, what breakfast cereal to pretend to eat. ... I couldn't do or say anything without anguish or regret."

Nico doesn't think of herself as poetic, but that's where she's wrong. Poetry, most of it in Nico's voice, plays a big role in both the style and the plot of

Goldengrove

. Prose surrounded herself with poetry during the writing: "I was revisiting the 19th-century romantic poets, and I was reading a lot of poetry anthologies."

Late in the composition process, Prose reread "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem is, famously, addressed to a girl named Margaret. "I thought, 'Wouldn't it be perfect for the ex-hippie parents, who know the poem, to name their Margaret in that way?' " Prose says. The father names his bookstore Goldengrove, after a place named in the poem. "Spring and Fall" will furnish Nico (herself named after the iconic singer in the Velvet Underground) with her own pivotal encounter.

At a time when too many writers, readers and publishers seem afraid of lyricism - as if people who read don't crave lovely writing - Prose forges the other way. Time and again in

Goldengrove

, a poetic image - "we sped past a fountain of writhing serpents spitting diamonds into the traffic" - illuminates a moment. Two anguished people eat sandwiches "as if we were teasing the flesh from a lethally bony fish." A child sneaks into her own house when the parents are out: "the house was no longer a danger zone but a site where a civilization had disappeared, leaving behind a ruin that was better off without the humans." A family gets some good news and "walks with the duckling bounce of schoolkids who've been ordered not to run in the halls."

It's a rare thing: a book to read for its metaphors and similes.

Read it, too, for its turn from danger to light, from despair to a hard-won contentment. The turn comes when, on a family vacation, everyone begins to shed months of suffering.

As Prose puts it, "Because Nico can't accept her loss, the desire to become the person she's lost is intense, to make it as if the other person still exists. But on the vacation, enjoying the sights, she realizes, '

I'm

seeing this, not

her

.' Nico has come through the stages of grief to accept that, although suffering never goes away, it does lessen, leaving her with a life to live."

A good novel is embodied advice. It portrays people in the throes of situations that change them and their worlds. Watching them manage can furnish us readers with all sorts of wisdom. Nico finds wisdom on her own. Maybe the best, says Prose, is that "whatever you think your life is going to be, it probably won't turn out exactly that way."