Here's a good book: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self. It reads like a breeze, and it's the breezy story of something you probably never thought could happen yet soon seems entirely possible and even likely: the kidnapping, I'll say, by family, of a rich boy born to radical parents—illegal parents, as the book has it. It's with special skill that the opening pages bring us right into three different worlds: Upstate New York, Uptown Manhattan, and another far-flung locale which I'll not reveal for fear of spoilage. Thereafter, we're threaded rapidly through these three worlds with such speed and delicacy that we're not always sure where we are, giving the sometimes pleasing, always dreamy, sensation of those worlds mixing, perhaps mixing in the boy's mind, stirring up a thick smoothie of worlds. This narrative knitting reminds me of Jeanette Winterson, but with a delivery more matter-of-fact, less breathy and gushing, and hence more compelling, maybe, than Winterson's.

The titular "him" is a boy of 8 or so, just the sort of fictional character that my parents and relations used to describe as "a boy like you," which means, I think, that the character is blank enough to project some ideal onto and in which they can read some imagined boyhood struggles, which they suppose derive only from the boy's smallness of perception. Which they could cure with the grandiosity of their experience. But this boy is far too well-behaved, too plucky, and he suffers each change of fortune much too smoothly, without nearly enough gnashing of teeth, to be a real boy. My reckoning is that the book takes, ultimately, the mother's perspective; it is really about her struggle, wanting to own this kidnapped boy, wanting to make good on the motherhood promise, to live up to the innocence and childlike fortitude that he, marvelously, possesses—the challenge a child makes just by existing. Is His Illegal Self a parable of motherhood?

The occasional hints of his later life, the scintillae of the future that strike out from this closely trimmed narrative, expand the book beyond a sort of simple yarn, challenging but ultimately silly. Imagining what this boy, with these experiences, his privilege and insane uprooting, becomes in adulthood, is one of the book's final charges. You or I, Unknown, might know a boy like this, grown up; he wouldn't mention his special, disappeared parents but would be forged by his riches, his Manhattan, and his lost wildness, digging earth and knowing birds.