Translated by Deanna Heikkinen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 332 pp, $37.50, hardcover.

There was a time-long ago, it too often seems-when novels were magical things. From the moment of opening the best ones you were aware that something special was going on, and when you finished them the world had changed, its elements rearranged.

The Skin of the Sky is one of those novels. It's magical, it alters the magnetic field, and naturally it seems old-fashioned yet is thoroughly modern at the same time.

Ostensibly, it is about Lorenzo, one of five siblings of a family in Mexico City. The mother is a dynamo rooted to the earth, the seldom-seen father a nonentity, although because this is a Latin American novel, the man is mysterious in his nonentity-ness.

When the mother dies, the family falls apart. Two children leave for the United States-one goes into banking and one into prostitution-another is lost to the street, and Lorenzo falls in love with the stars.

Supposedly, Lorenzo forsakes the world immediately around him for that at the other end of his telescope. Yet, ironically, he is firmly in the midst of life and the life of his country. His exploits are at the centre of the history of Mexico, from the 1930s to the present. Poniatowska portrays him as having always been cut off from world experience while simultaneously giving him a rich, even dangerous life: he is stabbed as a youth during a movie-house brawl over a girl; as a young man, he is tutored in the arts of love by a mistress of the king of Spain; he travels the world; and as an old man he falls in love with a young woman who is a pioneer hippie.

The novel is full of "contradictions" that would never survive the North American editing process. It is a novel about women with a male protagonist. Its characters don't play the roles we think have been assigned to them.

But life is like that, and that is what The Skin of the Sky is about: life, if you'll pardon the expression.

The sky is but a reflection of the world on earth, after all, layers and layers to be peeled. And that is the theme and the point of this novel, which is a great one, like novels used to be.