April 28, 1998 | Y ou probably thought your mythology days were over; how could you ever beat the ninth-grade titillation of hopefully searching the pages of "Oedipus Rex" for an actual sex scene between the king and his mother? But wait a minute -- doesn't Siddhartha seem like a crybaby compared to the patience you display when your 4-year-old regales you with yet another plot synopsis of the latest episode of "Muppet Babies"? If you have the right attitude, mythology can be even more gratifying now that you're an adult, especially if you're a parent. And if you're a parent with a spouse, mythology is the key to understanding the meaning of your pathetic mortal life. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. The Myth of How My Body Used To Be.
I don't like to tell this to most people, but I used to have an amazing body. This is an especially satisfying myth for me, since I was already the worn-out mother of a 2-year-old boy when I met my present husband. Boy, was my body perfect before my son was born! Just like Kathy Ireland. All of my friends' bodies were perfect, too. "Hey, look," said my friend Chris the other day while turning the pages of Mirabella. "Remember, I looked just like Cindy Crawford before I got pregnant with Ned?"

2. The Myth of How Exciting Our Marriage Was/Our Individual Past Lives Were Before We Had These Children.
Our house was always spotless. There was that hilarious asparagus caper, and it was so embarrassing to explain it to the police, standing there in our bathrobes ... We should have tape-recorded all those dinner parties, we could write a book! It was the best car we ever had, that Kharmann Ghia, and there wasn't a scratch on it. My husband's previous girlfriends were all Swedish, or they were Playboy centerfolds from the "Women of Astrophysics" spread. I dated that prince for years, and even after I had to end the engagement his family begged me to keep the jewelry.

3. Myth of Paranoia, Patron Goddess of Cleanliness.
I KNOW he loads the dishwasher wrong so he'll never have to do it again.

Developing a personal mythology is entertaining for a while, but if you get tired of manipulating the lives of the mortals who worship you, you might want to find out what the other goddesses, muses and monsters are up to. Three new books of mythic proportions do just that, and unless you're a winged beast with a volcano fetish, a schoolgirl married to a mad nobleman from South America or you've got a centuries-old reputation as the worst mother who ever lived, we're pretty sure these stories won't compete with your epic style.

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Medea
BY CHRISTA WOLF | DOUBLEDAY | 192 PAGESBY KAREN TEMPLER | Y ou know what I really love? I love it when a clever writer comes along and obliterates a saga we've been telling for thousands of years, offering new perspectives, breathing new life into stories that are sagging from overuse. I thought nothing could top John Gardner's "Grendel," wherein the Beowulf epic was retold from the point of view of the Savage Beast, making the reader feel almost criminal for having ever lent credence to Beowulf's version. But Christa Wolf's "Medea" makes that look like child's play.

Remember Medea? In Greek legend, she's the princess of Colchis who betrayed her father, cast a spell on his servants and (in some versions) killed her little brother, all for the love of Jason. She then helps to steal the Golden Fleece from her own people and flees with Jason and his Argonauts. She later gave a dress to Glauce, Princess of Corinth (whom Jason planned to marry in order to become heir to the Corinthian throne), which burst into flame. Glauce threw herself into a well and drowned, whereupon Medea killed her own children and fled the city of Corinth, leaving Jason to wither and die under the prow of his own ship.

The tale's been told, with some degree of variation, a thousand times. But in essentially every version Medea is an undisputed force of evil. So when I read Margaret Atwood's introduction to this new rendition and discovered that Christa Wolf intended to make me believe Medea was nothing if not a victim, while at the same time turning Medea's story into a pseudo-civics lesson for all generations, I was skeptical. To say she pulled it off would be quite the understatement.

In Wolf's richly updated version, told through the voices of several of the major characters, Medea is gracious and beautiful, while also a talented sorceress who uses her powers as she was taught. She comes from a savage land where the bodies of dead men are hung in sacks from the trees. She fled because her father had betrayed his people; the hapless Jason was simply a convenient escape. She only fell in love and married him once they'd left Colchis with the fleece and their lives barely in tact. When they arrived at Corinth, Jason was taken in by the king while Medea and their twin sons were banished from the castle. (It never occurred to Jason to join them.)

In the book's first chapter Medea tells us, in her strong, sad voice, that she's discovered the king of Corinth's dirty little secret -- the glittering city is actually no less savage than her homeland. Sickened by her discovery, Medea has no intention of sharing what she knows and in fact makes repeated attempts to help the Corinthians and to make a life for herself and her children in this strange land. But once her enemies learn of her discovery, they concoct a plot to turn even her own loyal followers against her.

The book's language is elegant and subtly old-worldy, although an occasional "Hey Jason ..." jars you back into the 20th century. Whether it's the fault of Wolf's original German manuscript or John Cullen's translation, these lapses are thankfully few. And while it may sound hard to believe, the contrast of Wolf's dark-skinned, wooly-haired, barbaric Colchians and her sparkling white Corinthian capitalists is never heavy-handed in its modern-day lesson-ness. But the book's greatest success is the complex and intriguing Medea herself. After knowing her story for 20-odd years, I feel I just finally met her.

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The Hacienda
BY LISA ST. AUBIN DE TERAN | LITTLE, BROWN | 342 PAGESBY DAWN MacKEEN | U nder the shade of the jacaranda trees and avocado groves, under the influence of medicinal cures and tradition, the narrative of Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's "The Hacienda" grows. In this lushly written memoir, St. Aubin de Teran recounts the years she lived in Venezuela, a tale so much like fiction it's hard to believe that her story took place in the tangible world and not on some surreal plane of her imagination.

The people who lived on the hacienda distrusted the road that weaved through its land almost as much as they distrusted St. Aubin de Teran when she first arrived from England. As a child bride who had married the most eligible bachelor of the land, Don Jaime Teran -- a reclusive aristocrat 20 years her senior -- she neither spoke proper Spanish nor came from a family that anyone knew of, and was looked at as "a homunculus, a life-form which had sprouted spontaneously from the mounds of vagasse." In a society where the people lived in the same way their parents and grandparents before them had been living -- under the reign of the Teran name -- destined roles were everything.

St. Aubin de Teran unfolds her quixotic world as the wife of the patriarch of an informal caste system. It was filled evenly with her husband's long silences and rages, and the languid hours she spent alone in a tin-roofed, cement-floored cottage by the side of a river. Her voice remains steady, almost placid, as she describes the intense solitude of her depressing days. She passes most of her time in the company of two beagles and a pet vulture named Napoleon -- the most loyal friend she has on the hacienda -- until she becomes pregnant, which finally opens the doors to the closed-in Andean community. She writes of her ride home from the hospital after her pregnancy test: "As we drove past the clump of banana palms that I knew to be the frontier post of the hacienda, I noticed for the first time since I had arrived, I didn't get the sensation of being taken back to prison after a turn round the yard. I was carrying inside me a way out of the silence."

St. Aubin de Teran details her struggle for acceptance and then her powerful rise while weaving in tales of customary local inflexibility and familial strife -- such as that of the father who accidentally poisons his son green because he can't read the witch doctor's deadly prescription. And subtly she paints the cycle of dependency between the people and the land and how, during the seven years that she lives at the hacienda, they decay together to the point that they cannot continue to co-exist.

From this engrossing place, where magic hangs in the air like the most humid of days, the author builds a moving portrait of a young woman alone in a place that took her years to understand. Throughout the book St. Aubin de Teran excerpts diarylike letters she sent to her mother, describing her everyday life. While these letters sometimes slow down the memoir, briefly repeating details already mentioned, they also serve as necessary road signs -- they are the author's and the reader's reality checks, reminding both that the hacienda isn't merely a mythical place visited only via someone's prose, but instead a real place St. Aubin de Teran initially reached by boat, and returned to through memory.

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The Autobiography of Red, A Novel in Verse
BY ANNE CARSON | ALFRED A. KNOPF | 149 PAGESBY KATE MOSES | I n her previous three books, Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson fearlessly melded the seemingly incongruous elements of Western canonical references and contemporary autobiography, making each seem both fresh and unquestionably related. In "Glass, Irony and God," for instance, Carson recreates Socrates, Artaud, Sappho and the Trojan hero Hector as television personalities; in "Plainwater," Carson's nameless narrator conflates classical Chinese wisdom and the lyrics of Ray Charles to muse upon the differences between men and women while enduring a cross-country camping trip with a boyfriend.

However they may ricochet off the corners of her imagination, Carson seems always to swing back to two concerns -- "how people get power over one another/this mystery" and "that custom, the human custom/of wrong love." Her first novel, "The Autobiography of Red," picks up those themes while illuminating in verse the life story of Geryon, the red, winged monster who was killed and robbed of a herd of magic cattle by Herakles (Hercules to the Latin-speaking, Disney-watching set) during his 10th labor.

Up until now, about Geryon or his feelings history has been concerned little, but Carson presents Geryon as a thoughtful little boy fascinated by his glamorous mother, who smokes and irons tea towels and, after neatening his little wings, shooes him gently out the screen door to kindergarten. As a teenager, Geryon's passions expand, first to photography and Emily Dickinson, then to Herakles -- the strongest man on earth and a demigod in other references, but here godlike only because he is the object of Geryon's first (and casually disregarded) love.

While thumbing through Fodor's Guide to South America and stumbling into slick-floored Argentine tango palaces during his requisite post-collegiate trip, Geryon unexpectedly meets up with Herakles again. And here, where -- already knowing the end of the story: the arrow through the monster's skull, the magical cattle stolen -- we could expect Carson to pull us inexorably to an expected mythic closure, she surprises us yet again.

Though Carson's ability to carry us willingly forward in a story we already thought we knew too well is impressive, and her exploding of that story into a narrative utterly unlike what anyone else could have imagined is even more so, it is her gift for blueprinting -- in a line, or a single image -- the ineffable details of emotional life and decoding the experience of the everyday that makes her such a delicious writer.

As the 14-year-old Geryon and his mother regard each other at his bedroom door, Carson captures the inescapable trajectory of adolescence and its attendant nostalgia for the child one once was: "Stale peace of old bedtimes/filled the room." Later, tormented by rejection and its relentlessly long dark nights of the soul, Geryon stares at the sweeping second hand of the electric clock by his bed: "its little dry hum/ran over his nerves like a comb." In one wincingly vivid sequence, "monstrous rectangles flare up the walls" and "enormous pools of moment" keep opening around his hands as poor Geryon finds himself profoundly stoned and just plain profound (or so he imagines) in a group that unluckily includes Herakles and Herakles' new love.

This is a strange and strangely absorbing story, one in which leaps through time and across continents, metaphoric flights over volcanoes and boring jobs shelving government documents somehow emulsify into a masterful and touching observation of what it means to find that you're finally the subject, not just the object, of your own myth.