Under her skin

DORIS LESSING has never been one to shy from bold moves. She married early to escape her overbearing mother, then left her husband and two children, wedding a German Communist classed as an enemy alien during World War II. Her most famous novel, "The Golden Notebook" (1962), was considered boldly feminist and structurally daring. In the 1980s, Lessing upset many of her readers by turning to science fiction. During the same period, she made headlines by submitting a novel to her longtime British publisher, Jonathan Cape, under a pseudonym -- demonstrating, with its rejection, how hard it is for unknown writers to break into print. Last year, when told she'd won the Nobel Prize for literature, she seemed more exasperated than exhilarated by the attention. "Oh, Christ! . . . It's a royal flush," she said.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that, nearing the end of her ninth decade, in what she declares is her last book, Lessing has pushed the boundaries of the memoir form. She does this by splitting "Alfred & Emily" between fiction and personal reminiscence, in order to attack from multiple angles material she's still struggling to understand.

Like Vikram Seth's "Two Lives," a joint portrait of his Indian-born great-uncle and German-born great-aunt, "Alfred & Emily" is about a couple derailed by war. But it is not a dual biography, nor is it simply an imagined history based on the interaction of two real people, like Julian Barnes' novel "Arthur & George." Although experimental in form, it does not seek to offer the sustained "exploration of an egoism" of H.G. Wells' 1934 "Experiment in Autobiography." Rather, "Alfred & Emily" recalls the fractured narrative structure -- with its compartmentalized notebooks and fiction embedded within the larger fiction -- of "The Golden Notebook." In juxtaposing fiction and nonfiction in one volume and clearly delineating which is which, "Alfred & Emily" raises questions about our changing attitudes toward memories as we age; about the different strengths of fiction and nonfiction when it comes to exploring character; and about the inherently subjective nature of memoir. As is usual in Lessing's fluidly conversational prose, ideas take precedence over stylistic perfection: "Alfred & Emily" may be more an exercise than a polished tour de force, but what a thought-provoking exercise it is.