Kensington Gardens, the Argentine novelist’s first book to be translated into English, is both a biography—occasionally true, often fictionalized, at times fantasized even within its own conjured truth—of Peter Pan scribe J. M. Barrie, and a personal history of its own narrator, modern-day children’s book author Peter Hook. Hook, an orphan of wealthy, acid-addled flower parents, created the Pan-like Jim Yang, a character played in film adaptations by the child actor Keiko Kai, who also plays the audience for Hook’s self-fable; Hook has kidnapped the youth, and the novel is a ream of apostrophes in his direction.

Of course, we readers are the ones actually playing Kai, which points both to the daunting power of our storyteller and to the novel’s wild arithmetic of substitution and mutability. In Gardens’s dense opening sequence, Hook describes Peter Pan’s suicide—the sextegenarian Peter Llewelyn Davies, Barrie’s inspiration for Pan, jumps in front of a speeding Tube train at the moment of Hook’s “increasingly hypothetical” birth—and wonders if it’s possible that he’s Pan incarnate. Such are the shifty foundations of Hook’s story: It’s a sort of quicksilver reality, in which identities and names, fact and fiction, sleeping and waking, can always dress up as each other. Hook’s book is about Neverland, and resembles Neverland, and sometimes even takes place in “Neverland,” his rococo childhood mansion, where Bob Dylan once vomited on his lead soldiers.

All this makes Kensington Gardens an extremely, exquisitely confusing book. But its metaphysical riddles aren’t gratuitous. As the stars of Barrie’s kids’ lit bleed into Hook’s life and the cultural record, books and lives find themselves drawing from the same textual field. That’s a comment on the fictional feel of ’60s excess: a world of real actors with posh names—Sebastian Compton-Lowe, Alexandra Swinton-Menzies—too twisty to be true.