It's repetition that feeds obsession, cutting a groove in your head that you just can't get out of. Regardless of developmental imperatives, the same principle holds true when little kids want to hear the same story over and over again. And again.

Thus began my relationship with Frances, the whimsical heroine of Russell Hoban's '60s-era series of children's books about a family of badgers. It started simply enough: Last year, "Bedtime for Frances" was the book my then-2-year-old wanted me to read to her ad nauseam. There are (mostly craven) ways around a lot of repetitive behavior; we all know that books and blankies "get lost." Solar-operated organs with microchips preprogrammed to play polka tunes can be jammed into a deep, dark closet or given away.

But I read about Frances obligingly, even relievedly -- at least hers wasn't a story created to serve the mindless television and movie character product market. It wasn't foolish, insipid or boring. It was far from any of those things. It was, in fact, irreverent, sly, droll and enigmatic, the product of a superior children's-book-creating mind and an earlier age, a book in which parents could sit in front of the television eating cake, offer a piece to a kid who should already be in bed or threaten to spank -- and still, everybody was perfectly well adjusted. This was a book I could read a lot. In fact, the Frances books, all seven of them, are the only books I can read over and over again without wanting to puke like a marathoner.

Why I never read Frances when I was a kid in the '60s, I don't know. But I did read another of Hoban's fictions in a college lit class. "Riddley Walker" is a post-apocalyptic fable set in the fifth millennium, when nuclear holocaust has catapulted civilization back to an Iron Age (the iron, in this ominous case, is dug up and salvaged from the machines of our own time) and language has been corrupted into a degenerated but tellingly poetic pidgin. Described by the New York Times as "lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy," "Riddley Walker" tells the story of a 12-year-old who stumbles into a quest for the answer to one of the essential human questions: How did we get here, and how do we get out?

Mulishly dismissive of anything that might be construed as science fiction, I resisted "Riddley Walker." And yet it drew me in. I just couldn't shake off Riddley's epiphanic discovery of the hart of the wood in the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral -- in Hoban's resonant linguistic purling, the "hart of the wood" is the "heart of the would," the human will. It's both our grace and our downfall. Five millenniums of my life and two children later, I thought of Riddley Walker and his search for existential understanding while I was reading "Bread and Jam for Frances." "Aren't you worried that maybe I will get sick and all my teeth will fall out from eating so much bread and jam?" Frances, after several meals of bread and jam on demand, asks her mother. "I don't think that will happen for quite a while," replies her mother. "So eat it all up and enjoy it."

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