I first came upon the word “serendipitous” serendipitously. I was looking up the spelling of “sequoia” in my dictionary—for a junior high school paper, if I remember correctly—and, well, I got distracted. The words in sequoia's vicinity were fascinating: Seraglio, the place in a Mohammedan palace where the wives and concubines are secluded. Serein, a very fine rain falling from a clear sky after sunset. And serendipitous, defined as good, beneficial, favorable; come upon by accident; of or pertaining to the making of desirable but unsought discoveries. The fact that I unearthed this last word in such a self-referential way seemed almost incredibly auspicious. So I adopted the word, used it three times and it was mine. That evening, I referred to my older brother's unexpected absence from the dinner table as “a serendipitous development.”

The idea of serendipity has been with me ever since, informing my travels, my movie-going, and especially my reading habits. Some of my favorite books have been those I've plucked almost at random off the bookstore shelves, or found under piles of sandy newspapers in beach houses, or been sent accidentally by somewhat disorganized book clubs. Hence the particular joy of the Hudson Review fiction chronicle. Books begin turning up miraculously in my mailbox. Most of them I've heard about; some I've even been intending to read. But my final selection of books to review is determined largely by whim. I examine typefaces. I look deep within myself and decide whether the world really needs another discussion of E. L. Doctorow's latest. And I read lots of page ones. The results of this rather arbitrary selection process—whether serendipitous or not—are reported here.

Reviewing books in this way can be an exhilarating experience. By ignoring what “They” tell me is a worthwhile book to read (“They” being my friends, editors, The New York Times Book Review, and all other sources of literary gospel), I can turn reading into an expression of independence, or even defiance. After all, reading, like writing, should always be a little subversive.

My first encounter with the work of British writer Jim Crace was a textbook illustration of serendipity. I chanced upon his debut book, Continent, in the library and decided that it looked interesting (OK, I liked the jacket art). The book turned out to be one of the most adventurous, intellectually provocative fictions I had read in a long time. So when The Gift of Stones, Crace's second book, turned up in my mailbox, I grabbed it immediately (despite the fact that I hated the jacket art). The verdict? One of the most adventurous, intellectually provocative fictions I've read since Continent. If he continues producing books like these, Crace may turn out to be one of the most original writers in our language, and the fact that he remains so little known in this country strikes me as profoundly unfair.

To describe The Gift of Stones as a parable about the act of storytelling might make the novel sound a bit precious, but the characterization is accurate. Crace begins with a germ idea suggested by his epigraph—an account of archeologists discovering the skeletal lower arm of a child in a pile of flints—and spins his tale from there, “inventing reasons why the arm was there, and what the fate had been of that child's other bones.” The result is a story set in an imaginary prehistoric village of stonecutters, where a boy struck by an arrow loses his infected arm to an amputator's stone knife. Finding himself one-armed in a community where two arms are necessary for the ordinary work of life, the boy is useless—until his idle wanderings beyond the confines of his village yield up an unexpected calling for him. He returns with wild tales of the outside world, storyteller's lies that ease the monotony of the stonecutters' mundane labors. He performs the same role, the author implies, that Crace himself does, providing his fellows with imaginative fictions through which and by which they can live a fuller existence.

All of this is told with great economy and charm, in the naive yet evocative language of parable. Crace's paragraphs read almost like poetic stanzas; his lines are cleanly imagistic, rife with approximate rhyme, and occasionally even metrical. As it turns out, this stylized prose proves necessary to carry the full weight of the author's allegorical intentions, which become increasingly ambitious as the novel unfolds. Crace wants to grant storytelling a much larger function than that of merely providing entertainment or even emotional fulfillment. When the arrival of bronze implements puts the skilled but unadaptable stonecutters out of business, they turn to the talkative amputee for nothing less than the reinvention of their lives. The novel ends with the storyteller leading the population out of the now defunct village to parts unknown, heavy with his new responsibility of imagining their future. Of course, this rather inflated portrait of the role played by imagination in pushing civilization forward is probably just another storyteller's lie, but it's a lie we can enjoy believing in, at least for a moment.