The author of "Possession" on the dark side of utopia, the chains of literary feminism and the albatross of sex By LAURA MILLER A.S. Byatt could be the patron saint of bookworms. She describes her often-bedridden child self as having been "kept alive by fictions" -- mostly the novels of Dickens, Austen and Scott. Among the first women admitted to Cambridge, she has always been a "greedy reader," who weaves her many interests -- biology, history, philosophy among them -- into her work. The results are novels with, as she has often stated, "the whole world in them," books that teem with characters and ideas, books in which reading and writing usually prove a matter of life, death and freedom. Already a formidable literary figure in England, Byatt achieved best-seller status in America with her 1990 novel, "Possession: A Romance," a compulsively readable story about a clandestine love affair between two Victorian writers and the two modern-day academics who unearth their secret. Her novella "Morpho Eugenia," in which she examines the similarities between anthills and 19th century manor households, was made into the film "Angels and Insects" last year. Byatt is currently touring the United States to promote "Babel Tower," the third novel in a series that follows Frederica Potter, a bookish, Cambridge-educated young woman like Byatt, through the volatile terrain of mid-20th century England. "Babel Tower" takes place in the 1960s, and concerns two trials: an obscenity prosecution against Frederica's employer (for publishing "Babbletower," an overripe fairy tale of a utopia gone bad) and the heroine's own battle for custody of her son. She spoke with Salon in San Francisco. Was it difficult to write about the cultural milieu of the '60s three decades later? It was quite interesting because I had to research it. I lived through it, which is one thing. But in order to write the novel, I read all the books that at the time I had skimmed through, not read properly or almost rejected, like Frederica, who didn't feel that what was happening was really what she wanted. She didn't rush into it wholeheartedly and take off her shoes and join a commune and smoke pot and freak out. She's not like that any more than I am. I started reading things like Jeff Nuttall's "Bomb Culture," which is a very intelligent argument for subverting the society he felt had created the bomb, by violence of an equal power in the other direction. And he really believed there was a war between the young and the old. Having read him, I have much more respect for him than I had in the '60s. I still think he was wrong. I also think he was extraordinarily stupid not to realize that young people get old and still have to exist. It never seemed to occur to any of those pro-youth people in the '60s that they would become old. Next page: Cannibalizing "The Lesbian Body"