If books were shelved according to the cadence of their titles rather than by the names of their authors, Benjamin Anastas' new novel might find itself wedged between Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony and Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England. Both of those were written before 1695. Who publishes "faithful narratives" any more? Who still writes about pastors? Mr. Anastas' title sounds lifted from the syllabus of a graduate seminar on the social history of 17th-century Puritans.

Colonial authors wrote "faithful narratives" and expected to be taken literally. But in 2001, no title containing the word "faithful" can ever be transparent. Mr. Anastas knows this, and the novel he has written (set in present-day New England, but fully conscious of its heritage) is as skeptical as those earlier works were devout. Mr. Anastas' novel questions anything promising complete fidelity. So if his theme is faith, in most senses of the word–spiritual, social, sexual–his lesson is that faith is as elusive as any narrative that purports to plot its course. In his first novel, An Underachiever's Diary , he evoked this quite literally: The object of the narrator's affection–the girlfriend of his own twin brother, the intelligent and beautiful ideal always beyond his grasp–was named Faith.

That earlier novel was a slim, first-person account of a well-meaning but mediocre hero who could not live up to the high standards of his angelic brother. For his second book, Mr. Anastas has broadened his scope: His frame is no longer the complaint of one protagonist, but rather the cross-section of a whole community. Here the main figure is Bethany Caruso, a frustrated and lonely wife living in an unnamed suburb near Boston. She has two children and a devoted husband whom she no longer loves. Bethany has exiled him to a room above the garage where, ensconced with his soft-core pornography collection, he pines for the wife who will not have him.

For years, Bethany has been suffocating from boredom. In the past, her only anodynes were Zoloft and marijuana supplied by the local teenage dealer. But everything changes when the local Pilgrims' Congregational Church imports a new pastor, Thomas Mosher, who is black (or half-black–his father was white). Immediately, Thomas becomes a subject of fascination for the community: The congregants struggle to interpret his esoteric sermons, the local women swoon and Bethany Caruso falls furiously in love.

But this isn't at all how it happens in the novel. A faithful narrative would probably tell the story sequentially: Bethany is miserable, Reverend Mosher arrives, they fall in love, he disappears. Instead, the novel opens with one long sentence–spanning four pages and comprising the entire first chapter–which anxiously recreates the parish's confusion in the wake of the disappearance. The narrative voice of this opening chapter is hardly the official record we might expect from a faithful narrative; it is, rather, the language of gossip. As the first sentence spirals on and on, we begin to realize that if this narrative is going to be faithful to anything, it will be only to the frantic and chattering energy of a town consumed by the mystery of its pastor's disappearance.

Soon Bethany emerges from this morass of confusion as the novel's main consciousness. Since the narrative constantly jumps back and forth in time, we meet her at the moment of Thomas' disappearance–long after the two have begun their affair. It is Mr. Anastas' skill that we accept and identify with Bethany immediately. She is a restless wife, beleaguered mother, minor wine addict and clandestine lover of the leader of her congregation: all at once, yet authentic in each. But as with Emma Bovary, everything about the heroine seems at the service of her vigorous will, specifically her will to love. In the fictional world of the bored small-town or suburban wife, the only possible flight is through the imagination towards passion. In Emma's case, the tragedy of this passion is gradual: We are subjected, step by step, to her abandonment by one lover and her disillusionment with another. But in Mr. Anastas' version, since he begins at the end–after the pastor has disappeared–we first encounter Bethany already bewildered and lonely: "She missed the pastor terribly, and wanted, if nothing else, just to hear his voice …. Suddenly, with this last thought, it dawned on her maybe, just maybe, weaning herself from the Zoloft had nothing at all to do with her volatile mood (although it couldn't help matters); it had been years, of course, since she had known anything to compare her desperation to, but wasn't she in love?"

Mr. Anastas makes a point of sketching in the small-minded congregants and busybodies of the community; he has a gift for rendering minor characters as something more than caricatures. But the center of his suburban world is his confused suburban wife. Bethany is the only major figure in this novel; although we meet the pastor in numerous flashbacks, his mysteriousness and ultimate disappearance make him a void in the middle of the novel. (The fact that he's black is a bit puzzling, too. Mr. Anastas wants to lay bare the true attitudes of a "liberal" white community towards its black pastor, but this is never quite fulfilled: One forgets about his race altogether.)

The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance places an unhappy and faithless suburban wife at the heart of a suburban novel in order to ask certain questions about suburbia. What is the role of the church in a landscape of banality? Can we transcend monotonous drudgery through love–even when that love is transgressive?

Bethany's condition is not only suburban desolation, but an acute awareness of that condition. Often it seems as if she knows not only Emma Bovary and Hester Prynne (another Massachusetts woman with a clergyman lover), but also Cheever, Updike, White Noise and the rest of the suburban canon. Bethany's will and intelligence are precisely what give this novel life, but at times her extreme self-consciousness, her realization of herself as an archetype and a figure, cause some suspicion in light of her station.

This is mediated, however, by a real generosity and tenderness on Mr. Anastas' part. Though there are certainly satirical elements in the book–mainly in the form of foolish minor characters–his comic vision is primarily a charitable one. So although his epigraph comes from Jonathan Edwards, you get the sense that his characters are condemned not so much to hell as to a sort of purgatory of fitness classes, Nintendo and Count Chocula. Mr. Anastas zeroes in on people who have lost faith–an adulterous wife, a pastor whose devotion to God is fading–and nevertheless shows them to be more heroic than their circumstances might normally permit. In fiction, it's often when a character's faith begins to wane that our faith in that character as somehow real is born.

Aaron Matz has reviewed fiction and literary criticism for The Observer and The American Scholar .

Did you see the newspaper pictures last month of Columbia University professor Edward Said? He wasn't photographed in his campus office or before a classroom of undergraduates or strolling in Morningside Heights–too commonplace for Mr. Said. He was in south Lebanon, in a throng of people hurling stones at the barbed-wire fence separating Lebanon from Israel. Mr. Said was celebrating the Israeli withdrawal from the area; he called throwing rocks at the border fence a "harmless act of joy."

Edward Said is that rare intellectual who fuses erudition with a fierce and unwavering activism. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, he has rarely strayed from his favorite cause: equal rights and sovereignty for Palestinians. And yet Mr. Said was not trained as a political scientist or a historian. He is a professor of literature who has written extensively on Conrad, Yeats and Austen; his most influential book is Orientalism , a study of British and French literary representations of the Near East.

So where is the true center of Mr. Said's thought? Some readers may have indeed wondered whether there are two distinct Edward Saids: one who writes about the Western literary tradition and another who denounces Zionism's degradation of the Palestinian people.

The publication of The Edward Said Reader , a new collection of his diverse writings, should eliminate the temptation to make such facile divisions. The editors of this volume (one a graduate of Columbia's English department and the other still a graduate student there) have made the wise decision to organize it not by genre or theme but by chronology. This may seem an obvious choice, but it should not be ignored. The chronological approach encourages us to focus on the continuity in Mr. Said's thought amidst the great fluctuations in his material. This volume–though culled from literary monographs, political tracts, cultural critique, essays on music and a memoir–gives us Edward Said in his ferocious unity.

Mr. Said's worldview is unified because he does not really consider literature at all distinct from life. Metaphysical approaches to reading, like New Criticism, or systematic modes, like structuralism, are not for the pragmatic Mr. Said. Literature exists in and describes things of the real world; thus, the architecture of novels and the patterns of verse cannot be examined in sheer aesthetic terms. "It is the critic's job," Mr. Said wrote in 1982, "to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests." He would eventually call this manner of reading "secular criticism." Influenced by Michel Foucault, Mr. Said would pursue the relations between writing and authority–exploring how institutions of power shape our access to literature, even when we believe that access to be unmediated.

The most notorious essay in this collection, a study of Mansfield Park entitled "Jane Austen and Empire," is a fine example of secular criticism. Mr. Said focuses on the English country estate of the title, inhabited by the novel's heroine Fanny Price but financed by the slave labor on her uncle's plantation in Antigua. Mr. Said exposes a conspiracy of "interests and concerns spanning the hemisphere, two major seas, and four continents." There is an unspoken compact, he argues, between the domestic authority on the estate at Mansfield Park and the slave trade in the West Indies. "The question of interpretation, indeed of writing itself, is tied to the question of interests," he contends. "We must not say that since Mansfield Park is a novel, its affiliations with a sordid history are irrelevant or transcended."

This kind of reading helped launch a thousand miserable volumes of diatribes masquerading as responsible criticism. When weaker minds give voice to political complaint within literary studies, the result can seem ridiculous, often because it is so easy. But Mr. Said never loses sight of the literary dimensions of the authors he examines. He rails against "the invasion of literary discourse" by fashionable methodologies. He expresses concern that his study of Austen will encourage readers to "jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery." And if he reads novels politically, he also understands politics novelistically: In his political essays, he compares the absurdities of the Palestinian situation to "some comic fantasy produced in the imagination of a Swift or Kafka." When, therefore, in the interview that concludes the volume, Mr. Said confesses, "I've never felt that my own interest in literature and literary issues has been a hindrance to me," you know it's an understatement. His literariness informs every essay collected here.

Literary sensibility makes his political writings more fluent, more urgent and more effective. Several essays on the subject of Palestine are collected here, including "The Palestinian Experience," "Permission to Narrate" and the galvanic "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims," a much-cited chapter from his 1979 book The Question of Palestine . Mr. Said's thesis is that Zionism has been effective by "being a policy of detail, not simply a general colonial vision," by which he means that Israel has subjugated the Palestinians by stunning them with specific policies and laws (especially the systematic post-1967 Israeli settling of the West Bank and Gaza) to which they have had no answer.

Mr. Said's Palestine writings, spread over four decades, catalog Israel's transgressions, its gradual solidification of land and power in the Middle East. Over the course of his career, he loses faith in Yasir Arafat, breaks with the P.L.O. and rejects the Oslo accords as a humiliating compromise. The tone of these political writings is about one part sadness and five parts outrage. We are confronted with a furious intelligence in constant stupefaction at the injustice in his native land–and at the West's indifference to it.

Yet his sadness is never overwhelmed by his outrage. With Mr. Said's writings condensed and assembled, you begin to understand that it isn't political jeremiad or polemic that defines his voice; it's melancholy. The central theme of his collected writing isn't really the Palestinian experience (indeed, some critics have pointed out that Mr. Said spent most of his childhood comfortably in Cairo, and therefore should not claim to have shared the Palestinian experience). His great theme is the exile's experience. Just consider his heroes, all of whom he discusses in this anthology: Joseph Conrad, the Polish exile writing in English; Jonathan Swift, born in Ireland but deeply ambivalent about his native land; Erich Auerbach, the scholar of European literature who wrote his great work, Mimesis , as an exile in Istanbul during the Second World War; and Theodor Adorno, the German critic who fled the Nazis, escaped to Southern California and hated it.

The title of Mr. Said's most recent work, Out of Place , helps explain his fascination with these figures. The book is a memoir of his childhood in the Middle East, but its title signals a crucial motif in his life–his sense of being a perennial exile. The editors of this volume compare Mr. Said's elegiac tone to Proust, but there is a major difference: Mr. Said seeks to recapture a lost place, not a lost time. The melancholy that permeates this book is always a function of space; Mr. Said moons about the lost geography of his childhood, the disputes over land in Palestine, the tragedy of Yeats' Ireland, the sinister provenance of estates and plantations in Jane Austen's England.

In Edward Said's world, there is no border fence between fictional landscapes and geopolitical zones. This anthology succeeds in condensing the work of an intellect defined otherwise by its great expanse.

Aaron Matz has reviewed fiction and literary criticism for The New York Observer and The American Scholar .

The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip , edited by David Littlejohn. Oxford University Press, 306 pages, $30.

In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance , by David Thomson. Alfred A. Knopf, 330 pages, $27.50.

Andrés Martinez, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal , cooked up a clever way to land a $50,000 book deal. He said to a publisher: Handmea50-grandadvance,andI'llgambleit away in Las Vegas. Then I'll write a book about it. The publisher (Villard) agreed.

This may seem an absurd premise for a book, but then isn't Vegas an absurd idea for a major American city? Las Vegas has been for some time America's fastest-growing city (with more hotel rooms than anywhere else on Earth); Nevada is the fastest-growing state in the union. And since gambling has now spread to riverfront cities and Indian reservations throughout the country, everyone is turning to Vegas for diagnosis and prophecy. We may disagree about Las Vegas' metaphoric value and "meaning"; we may disagree about the practical lessons taught by its sprawl, its architecture and its gambling-based economy–but the one point on which we all emphatically agree is that this city needs to be examined. Though there is already a vast library on the subject, these three new books argue that Las Vegas has mutated so quickly that the library needs renovation–or perhaps a total overhaul.

The question is: What's the best method or genre for describing this strange place? Mr. Martinez's response may seem as good an answer as any. Las Vegas is a visceral experience, so why not evoke it through a highly detailed report from the front lines of a monthlong gambling session? The result, 24/7 , is the easygoing confession of a man who loses about $45,000 in 150 hours of blackjack, baccarat, roulette and craps. Though the book's precursor is Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), the scenery has changed utterly. Much of Mr. Martinez's effort is spent revealing the "new" Las Vegas: less the seedy 1970's outpost, slowly shedding its Mob past, than the magnificently refashioned theme park of today. Thus, though he visits such older casinos as the Desert Inn and the Golden Gate, he shows the real action to be at the newer palaces: the Luxor, New York-New York and the Bellagio–and the clean sidewalks and escalator overpasses that connect them.

The best parts of 24/7 involve the play-by-play of gambling, like this portrait of the baccarat pit, where wealthy Chinese businessmen congregate to wager obscene sums of money: "When Mr. J. was dealt the cards … he produced a purple marble, with which he'd tap the cards before turning them over. This was a mild eccentricity compared to the protracted shenanigans that took place at the other end of the table before the cards were unveiled. The C.'s and K.'s would check out how many 'sides' each card had, pound the table, rub the cards on the green felt, scream, 'San bin!' … and often tear up the cards in disgust."

24/7 is less persuasive when it tackles larger themes like the growth of Las Vegas, the ecological impact on the desert, Dostoevsky and the social hazards of gambling. And Mr. Martinez would be well advised to omit some of the more expendable details. When Dickens said that "facts alone are wanted in life," I doubt he had this in mind: "I read up on Death Valley over a hot-and-sour soup and some Mongolian beef. Then I ambled across the attractions level to the Swensen's in the food court and bought myself some raspberry sorbet on a waffle cone."

Is Mr. Martinez's Vegas–full of complimentary weekends at the Luxor, high-stakes roulette and raspberry sorbet–the real Las Vegas? David Littlejohn would answer No. For Mr. Littlejohn, professor emeritus of journalism at Berkeley and editor of The Real Las Vegas , that elusive sphere lies somewhere beyond Caesars Palace and the Bellagio. To find it, he led a team of 15 reporters from the Berkeley graduate program in journalism to "the city in which 1.2 million Las Vegans actually live, beyond the Strip and Downtown." If Mr. Martinez's precursor is Hunter Thompson, Mr. Littlejohn's is clearly Robert Venturi, who led a team of Yale architecture students to Las Vegas and wrote Learning From Las Vegas (1972).

The Real Las Vegas is not nearly as urgent, and not as convincing, as Learning from Las Vegas , which was half a manifesto about postmodern urbanization and half a celebration of American vernacular architecture. Mr. Venturi's work had the feel of a unified whole, whereas The Real Las Vegas is a disjointed collection of essays about various facets of life in Las Vegas: the Hispanic community, the labor scene, pawnshops, the homeless. These glimpses rarely show Las Vegas to be much different from other American cities. And while that is to some degree the point of this book–that Las Vegas bears more similarity to "normal" urban America than we may want to acknowledge–we find ourselves mired in the familiar Vegas paradox. Is this the quintessential American city, based on excess, speculation and the grotesque, with an immense infrastructure, school system and suburban belt? Or is Las Vegas forever unique, exceptional even, because it is rooted in that strangest form of commerce?

Two essays in The Real Las Vegas stand apart. The first, Jenna Ward's "Water for the Desert Miracle," is perhaps the best condensed explanation of Las Vegas' irrigation schemes, which are just as byzantine as those Jake Gittes uncovered in the Los Angeles of Chinatown . And Maia Hansen's "Skin City" is an engaging sketch of the "sex industry" in Las Vegas and the surrounding area. If you've ever wondered whether johns adapt their fantasies to the topographical situation of the whorehouse (there are still several legal brothels in Nevada), Ms. Hansen can clue you in: "One girl she knew had a guy pay her $5,000 to walk him naked through the desert with a collar and leash, like a camel."

The best new book on Las Vegas is neither Mr. Martinez's nor Mr. Littlejohn's, but David Thomson's In Nevada . (Mr. Thomson is well known for his writing on cinema: He has written about Orson Welles and David Selznick; his magnum opus is A Biographical Dictionary of Film .) But though In Nevada engages Las Vegas as forcefully as 24/7 or The Real Las Vegas , the book's compass is not limited to the city. Mr. Thomson is in love with the vast space of Nevada, its Western mythologies and all of its idiosyncrasies and grotesqueries. He addresses the new Las Vegas of the Bellagio and the suburban housing developments, but he writes most passionately about the empty miles of the north, the Lake Tahoe coastline in the west, and the nuclear waste containers of the Nevada Test Site in the center of the state, not far north of Las Vegas.

In Nevada 's own precursor is John McPhee's Basin and Range , a gently muted lovesong to the geology of northern Nevada. But though it digs into red rock and sediment, In Nevada veers more often toward the manmade. Mr. Thomson is one part John McPhee and three parts Don DeLillo. His obsessions with the Nevada Test Site–especially the fabled Area 51, alleged repository of nuclear waste and alien species–are elaborated with the paranoid intensity of Underworld . "The Government has always regarded Nevada as a place unlike others," he writes, "fit for tests, experiments and ventures it would sometimes rather not talk about. And so the state that has had a special appeal to loners, libertarians and anarchists is also a playground of the Federal Government."

Mr. Thomson's prose reads like a long inducement to hypnosis. His lulling voice persuades us that eclectic statistics and odd rumors, when woven together, form a transcendent unity. Thus, "Nevada" is not a political entity with cities, laws and universities, but instead a maelstrom of anthrax conspiracies, storage facilities for surveillance tapes from Vegas casinos, fantasies for a statue to Bugsy Siegel, an immense desert crater forged by a nuclear blast–all evoked by Mr. Thomson in his highly stylized, deceptively calm manner. Lurking behind his prose, barely hidden by the awe in which he holds this strange and mostly empty state, is a conviction that Nevada is the last refuge for American individualism. Mr. Thomson's triumph is that he situates the wonderful accident of Las Vegas within the larger context of Nevada, and reveals the city's slot machines to be just one manifestation of a greater American phantasmagoria.

Perhaps it's normal for a poet to decorate his studio with the face of a great precursor. But Mr. Kunitz's choice of inspiration is a little odd. Rimbaud, the great French visionary, wrote Une Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations when he was a teenager, then retired from poetry at 19. He is, famously, the youngest of the great verse writers. Mr. Kunitz, on the other hand, is 94 and quite possibly in the prime of his career. In fact, he may be old enough to earn an even stranger title: the oldest working poet in the history of literature.

This is no exaggeration. For who are the masters who wrote very late into life? There's Thomas Hardy, who died at 88. Robert Frost won his third Pulitzer Prize at age 63, but died at 89. Wordsworth, famed elder statesman of the Romantics?Deadat80. Among the indestructible prose writers, Victor Hugo passed away at 83 and Tolstoy died at 82. Mr. Kunitz's only real competition maybe Sophocles–but according to the most reliable dates we have, Sophocles didn't live past 90. Stanley Kunitz turned 90 way back in 1995.

Asked about his relationship to those poets and writers, Mr. Kunitz said, "Those are masters for me. I think I've at least been true to their spirit, but I would not claim equality–it would be arrogant and insufferable!" He was in his study. He paused to drink from a tall glass of gin and tonic. "I'm a little uncertain how I feel about it. I think longevity is a great virtue, and to live long and to keep one's energy and ardor alive is, I think, unusual to say the least. So I can understand the attention. But I don't think my poems are any better because I'm 94, though it makes them a little rarer."

His age may not necessarily ensure the quality of his verse, but it has certainly not diminished it. Most poets acquainted with Mr. Kunitz's poetry confirm that his work of the past two decades is his strongest. One of his closest friends, and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner, the poet Galway Kinnell, said: "There are precocial poets and there are altricial poets. Some, the precocial, are hatched completely formed, but others are altricial: They are unformed. They don't have feathers. They have to mature a long time before they can fly. There are two classes in the bird kingdom as there are in the kingdom of poets. Stanley developed very slowly. His potential was there, but it was no Saison en Enfer . You see, the Rimbauds were Faustian. They made a bargain with

the devil: Give me 10 years of great and shocking poetry and then I'll die. But Stanley made no such pact. He's worked with other poets to dispel the Faustian nightmare that broods over every poet."

Mr. Kunitz's strategy, according to Mr. Kinnell, is to age by not aging at all. "Some poets, like Wordsworth, became complacent, sure of his powers, a true adult in the negative sense of the word. He lost what Stanley has never lost–a childlike attitude to reality, where he could be continually surprised and taken aback, and in which he could grow."

An afternoon spent with Mr. Kunitz at his summer home in Provincetown, Mass., confirms Mr. Kinnell's theories. Mr. Kunitz spends most of the year in Manhattan, where he and his wife, the painter Elise Asher, live on West 12th Street. But every June, and since 1962, when he bought the house from the town madam, poet and painter come to this cape, where Mr. Kunitz is known more for his flowers and plants than for his age or his verse. He spends every morning tending his garden, a maze of lacecap hydrangeas, crape myrtles, indigo plants and guara, among hundreds of other species. In the garden, he is never old: digging soil, marveling at a hummingbird, ordering rows of plants as if they were poetic lines.

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1905, shortly after the suicide of his father. After studying at Harvard, he came to New York in 1928 and worked for the publisher H.W. Wilson. He published his first book of verse, Intellectual Things , in 1930. He spent several years on a 100-acre farm in Connecticut, then three years in the U.S. Army. In 1945, Mr. Kunitz received a Guggenheim fellowship. He hadn't even applied; Marianne Moore, who had published his work in The Dial , had sponsored him. He taught at Bennington College for a few years and then met Ms. Asher, whom he married in 1958. While other writers of his generation hit upon something in the 1920's Jazz Age or during the Depression, Mr. Kunitz felt more at home among the artists of the 50's.

"They became our closest friends: Rothko, Kline, Motherwell and the rest of them. For most of the year we lived in the Village on 12th Street. Elise and I were living in one of the old brownstones. The Abstract Expressionist painters were mainly the people we saw. Everyone was just beginning a career. There was a sense of great friendship, a lot of dancing and drinking. It was, I'm sure, one of the great periods in American history."

Only in the 50's, when Mr. Kunitz himself was in his 50's, did his career gather force. His Selected Poems, 1928-1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1959. In the years that followed came the Bollingen Prize and other awards. His acclaimed collection The Testing-Tree was published in 1971, Next-to-Last Things in 1985 and, most recently, Passing Through , which won a 1995 National Book Award for the then-90-year-old poet. Along the way, he has been editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a professor at Columbia and the first official state poet of New York. In the past two decades, he has devoted much of his time to two organizations he helped found: the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Poets House in Manhattan. The latter, a SoHo loft space and 35,000-volume library, sponsors readings, organizes programs and encourages community among New York poets.

Mr. Kunitz is not the sort who believes artists should shutter themselves away from society and one another. "There are poets like him, and like Ginsberg, who have a genius of generosity," explained Jason Shinder, another poet who splits his year between New York and Provincetown. "They let people enter their lives." Indeed, one of Mr. Kunitz's favorite phrases–taken from Keats, who alongside Blake, Hopkins and Herrick is one of his great masters–is "negative capability," which denotes the poet's ability to flow into everyone and everything. Or, as Galway Kinnell explained it, "Rilke said, 'There is an ancient enmity between our lives and the great works we do.' Stanley believes in an ancient collaboration between our lives and the works we do."

At his Cape Cod home, Mr. Kunitz said, "What recurs over and over again in my poems, and what is usually at the core of a poem, is the search for renewal. I think that explains a whole lot about my survival." Mr. Kunitz's verse, especially the more recent poems collected in Passing Through , is also masterfully cadent. He laments that "so many of the poets of the current generation don't really hear poetry. They think of it as something on the page. It's a dead music if it's any music at all."

Does his advancing age diminish the aural or visceral experience of his poetry?

"Well, my hearing is obviously not as good as it was, and I'm sensitive to that. My vision used to be miraculous and now it's only fair. But my basic sense as a poet, and as a human being, is the sense of touch. And that doesn't fail me at all; I feel it just as strong today, or even stronger."

He was asked if the older brain works differently in conceiving a poem.

"There is a difference. In youth, your glands write your poems for you in a steady rush and ejaculation. My early poems were delivered to me every morning like the daily newspaper. But that doesn't happen anymore. In age, the poems lie buried under the debris of the life. And you have to dig for them. It's a laborious process, and it takes courage."

"Are you reluctant to have people raise the subject of your age?"

"Well, I joke about it, but I'm aware that it's an unusual aspect of my existence. I've grown so used to it. At the beginning I resisted it, and a couple of years ago, the Sunday Times magazine did a piece about the 'geriatrics': artists and scientists and so forth. I didn't want to be in it, and I didn't write a piece for it, because I don't think it's a unique category. I don't think it stands alone. I feel that my associations are mostly with the young and not with the old. So therefore I don't want to be classified as a 'geriatric poet.'"

Even if that awful phrase puts you in the company of Sophocles, Michelangelo and Hardy?

"Well, those you mentioned all lived to just about 90. So I'm much older than they were. But, you know, there's something pathetic about Hardy. When he was working on his later poems, Winter Words , he wrote a preface in which he celebrated his 89th year. At least that was his intention. But when he came to write it down, he couldn't bear to write '89,' so he left it blank. And the book was published just after he died. I suppose he thought it was inviting disaster to write down the year."

Stanley Kunitz avoids such superstitions, and with a little luck he should be able to maintain his fearlessness well into the next century. He still has two books left in a three-book contract with his publisher.

What do we mean when we say that a book is "hypnotic"? What exactly is a "mesmerizing" novel? Not one that puts us to sleep. Nor does a prose-induced trance necessarily suppress our critical faculties, as true hypnosis can. What the cliché does mean is that a deft author has destroyed our sense of control. A mesmerist like Melville or Nabokov wraps us up in words and dares us to break free.

In his new novel, Perlman's Ordeal , Brooks Hansen exploits the metaphor to the fullest: He casts a doctor of suggestion as his protagonist; he also hypnotizes the reader with magisterial prose. Mr. Hansen's hero is August Perlman, a Jewish doctor from Vienna who emigrated to London in 1899. Dr. Perlman operates a clinic where his methods of hypnotism or suggestion–defined as "the act by which an idea is introduced into the brain and accepted by it"–have earned him a strong reputation and enough income to indulge frequently in his greatest pleasure: hearing Grieg, Sibelius or Mahler at the symphony.

One Monday evening in 1906, a stern man brings his 13-year-old girl to the doctor's clinic. Sylvie Blum is completely dehydrated from hydrophobia; her father demands that Perlman "hypnotize her and tell her to drink again." But when the doctor begins his treatment, "Nina," a second personality, emerges from the schizophrenic girl. Through Perlman's hypnosis treatment, the girl begins to drink and eat again, but the Sylvie who was admitted as his patient seems irrevocably lost to the dominant Nina.

Meanwhile, at the symphony one evening, Perlman meets Madame Helena Barrett, a glamorous Russian emigrée and spiritualist whose brother Alexander, now dead, was a composer who Perlman believes wrote "the most spontaneous and downright defiant melodic lines of any composer of his generation." The doctor and Madame begin a flirtatious friendship.

Perlman's Ordeal traces the weeklong trajectory of Perlman's loss and recovery of his patient's psyche, alongside his stunted pursuit of Madame Helena. The doctor makes a serious mistake by mixing the professional and the social: When Nina and Madame Helena meet, the elegant woman takes an uncommon interest in the girl. She manages to hypnotize Nina better than Dr. Perlman ever could. In the novel's central, protracted set piece, Madame and a group of her friends draw a bizarre story out of Nina. Her original neurosis and malady–hydrophobia and dehydration–seem to be lingering symptoms brought on by underwater experiences in the kingdom of Atlantis.

Perlman's in a pickle. He is spellbound by Madame Helena, yet she has caused his patient to spiral into the realm of the fantastic, where the doctor steadfastly refuses to go. As in Mr. Hansen's extraordinary first novel, The Chess Garden , an unconventional doctor stands at the fulcrum of the story's moral and metaphysical universe. In that earlier book, the pathologist Gustav Uyterhoeven creates an elaborate chess garden in his backyard and invents a fantastical imaginary universe in which chessmen and other game pieces come to life. Uyterhoeven is a doctor who forsakes medicine for the vitalist teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

In Perlman's Ordeal , Mr. Hansen gives us another doctor with a fertile imagination. Though Dr. Perlman is less of a fabulist than Dr. Uyterhoeven, he has a fatal weakness: He loves music. Perlman's fascination with composers–his ambivalence toward Mahler, his reverence for the dead Alexander Barrett–threatens to overshadow his faith in his science, medicine. In fact, his view of musical structure and genius is barely scientific at all. In one debate, as Madame Helena's self-styled intellectual friends allude to new forms of orchestral composition–you can almost hear Schoenberg on the horizon–the doctor argues against atonality: "You can't get beyond melody." When asked why, he gives a beautiful answer: "Because … melody expands. It's been expanding for the last 3,000 years."

One of Mr. Hansen's achievements is to invent doctors who consistently elude the clichés of that profession. Doctors who expand. Perlman is an esthete, a connoisseur of music. He is also a hypnotist: a "doctor" whose greatest tool is narrative. Rather than poke with a scalpel or listen with a stethoscope, Dr. Perlman soothes his patients with words, and seeks to draw out the same in them. Mr. Hansen slips in a few understated allusions to the fledgling Freud, not surprising in a novel about a Viennese Jewish doctor transplanted to London. When, for example, Perlman picks up a copy of Freud's newly published Interpretation of Dreams , the hypnotist quickly falls asleep.

But Perlman's methods, and by extension the wheels and machinery of this novel, are not psychoanalysis. That is, they depend less on the patient's stream-of-consciousness than on the doctor's powers of suggestion. Helena claims that Perlman's "guiding faith" is "that man is a very suggestible little creature." The issue is control. It's like Perlman's reverence for composers who expand melody, or our reverence for authors we describe as hypnotic: They wield power. Hence the doctor's explanation of how a master musician composes: He confronts "what might at first seem like chaos and, simply by applying his mind, manage[s] to make sense of it. Tame it."

Composers aren't the only ones in Perlman's Ordeal to apply their minds to the subjugation of chaos. Hypnotists, too, tame the wild. Nina, Sylvie's alter ego, seems at first essentially chaotic. Dissociative personalities are, according to the novel, " miroirs brisés ": "absent any real history, they tended to reflect whatever was put in front of them." As Perlman later says of Nina: "She is a shard; she's a broken mirror." A similar dynamic is played out in Nabokov's Pale Fire , in which shadow, warring versions of Kinbote and Shade work to create each other. A struggle between two stubborn figures, each seeking tyranny over the other, results in mutual reflection.

If the properties of music spill into the practice of hypnosis, the enchantments of hypnosis transcend the doctor's clinic as well. Love, of course, can be hypnotic; the doctor confesses to Madame Helena: "I'm sure I'm not the first to tell you, you've a mesmerizing presence." Music blurs into hypnosis, hypnosis into infatuation, and it all blurs back into music. Thus, when Perlman listens secretly to a Welte-Mignon, a sort of player piano, of Alexander Barrett's music: "[A]s the flat ivory slats began curtsying before him, he found himself very nearly mesmerized."

Take even Nina's preposterous story about Atlantis. Her extended recovered memory is probably the weakest part of Perlman's Ordeal ; tales of Atlantis sound as ridiculous to us as they do to Dr. Perlman–not necessarily a good thing. Sylvie gets obscured by Nina, her dominant other self, but even Nina remains a cipher to us. Still, the very notion of Atlantis, and the girl's stubborn belief in the reality of her experiences there, remind us of the true virtue of mythical places: They are exactly what we make of them. As Madame Helena explains, Atlantis is "the one place about which we are free to think anything we like"; Atlantis is to Madame Helena what she and Perlman both want Nina to be–the template for their fantasies.

But fantasies are never simply benign for Dr. Perlman. Nina's storytelling is no different from his own medical practice–both doctor and patient want to discipline the other. "The girl's behavior was fairly obvious," Perlman feels. "This garish fairy tale she'd concocted was nothing but a kind of revenge on him." When that master hypnotist, Nabokov, wrote that "all novels are, in a sense, fairy tales," he must have had this ruthlessness in mind. Mesmerizing novels lure you with otherworldly tales. Then they ensnare you.

A large dog stares at us from the cover of Paul Auster's new novel, Timbuktu . Does that mean the book is about a dog? Mr. Auster has never written on that subject before. Or could the book jacket be some kind of clue to the novelist's corpus? That is: Haven't someofMr.Auster's books,intheiranatomy and temperament, been rather canine themselves? Leviathan , a strong American epic that races swiftly across the continent, is surely Mr. Auster's greyhound. His memoir of failure and futility, Hand to Mouth , is more like a basenji, a poor barkless creature. Mr. Vertigo , about a boy who learns to levitate, is airborne like a springer spaniel–but as odd as a shar-pei. Then there's The New York Trilogy , that compact troika: Mr. Auster's three toy poodles, perfectly crafted and esteemed enough to be the front-runners at a literary version of the Westminster dog show.

The dog on the cover of Timbuktu is not the thoroughbred its predecessors are. Timbuktu is indeed a novel about a dog, a mutt named Mr. Bones; it's from his perspective that the story is told. Unfortunately, the dog is not the only mongrel thing about this novel. Timbuktu is a mutt not because its protagonist is a mutt, but because it is a narrative of indeterminate ancestry, the offspring of a too-hasty coupling of literary genres, a story too schizophrenic to know what kind of novel it wants to be.

Timbuktu takes place, like many of Mr. Auster's narratives, on the road. We join Mr. Bones and his master, the demented street-poet vagabond Willy G. Christmas, in Baltimore, where they have traveled in the final journey of Willy's life. The middle-aged Willy has been deranged and mostly homeless since a terrible drug phase during college drove him batty and into an institution. Shortly after he was released, he had a vision of Santa Claus speaking to him from a television set. He was born again: William Gurevitch transformed into Willy Christmas, his distinct mission "to embody the message of Christmas every day of the year, to ask nothing from the world and give it only love in return."

When Mr. Bones entered the scene, he became Willy's sole companion. At the time Timbuktu begins, with Willy approaching death, dog and man have come to Baltimore to deliver two things to Willy's high school English teacher, who now lives there: a long manuscript and Mr. Bones himself. Only then can Willy die in peace. But the vagrant dies before he can locate the teacher, and Mr. Bones is left to roam through Maryland, and the rest of the novel, without his beloved master.

Plot is hardly the point of this novel. Mr. Auster is up to something other than weaving together the complex fibers of intrigue, a concern more typical of earlier works like The New York Trilogy . But since Timbuktu is a short and somewhat mystical novel, lacking the epic scale of a book like Leviathan , it invites comparison to those first novellas.

The New York Trilogy , especially its first installment, City of Glass , was a taut collection of brainy, obscurely allegorical detective tales–and at the same time an anxious, elegantly drawn vision of urban anomie. Since then, however, a different strain has dominated Mr. Auster's writing: the picaresque, which has helped define his already pulsating obsession with wandering souls and the relentless, chance-driven movement of his characters. Though some readers believe Mr. Auster's central obsession to be coincidence, or solitude, or sleuthing, he is in fact more infatuated with vagabondage and restlessness than with anything else. Take one of the most brilliant passages in Mr. Auster's writing (from City of Glass ), where one character reads another's meanderings through Manhattan as a gigantic calligraphic message. Walking, for Mr. Auster, is simply a form of writing.

The picaresque mode, the inevitable idiom for such an obsession, became an Auster signature: Most evident in Moon Palace and Mr. Vertigo , it also informs TheMusicofChance and even Leviathan . The central problem with Timbuktu is that it can't decide to what genre it belongs. Its compass is too smalltoaccommodate thepicaresqueoflater Auster; its story is too goofy to fit the arch-serious, metaphysical mold of his early works.

This kind of hesitation pokes through the surface everywhere in Timbuktu , especially in the language. Willy Christmas tends to speak in cliché–a strange hybrid of platitudes and Americana twang–and his speech infects the diction of the narrative as well. He says things like "I'm warning you, kemo sabe," "just look around this dreary burg," "take a seat beside me while I rest my pins," and "Pack up your bags, amigo. We're on the road to Splitsville." Now Willy is talking to his dog; he can be forgiven. But the voice of the narrative–corresponding more or less to Mr. Bones' canine mind–begins to suffer from the same malady. Thus: "there were no more than a few ticks left in the clock," "Mr. Bones had heard enough stories to make his fur tingle," "Willy was one in a million," and "life in that apartment would have been no picnic."

To make matters worse, Mr. Auster hesitates. Instead of sticking to this tone (flawed as it is), he falls into a mannered argot. Soon the wise fool Willy Christmas is sounding like a graduate student: "Dog as metaphor, if you catch my drift, dog as emblem of the downtrodden, and you're no trope, my boy." Mr. Bones becomes a " chien à tout faire "; he can even untangle "the knots of [a] spoonerism." Timbuktu wavers: It tries to make us either nostalgic for the Kind Bum and his Canine Sidekick or interested in two savants meditating on semiotics and rhetoric.

Such inconsistencies of diction give way to a larger problem. Who is talking here? Mr. Bones? Mr. Auster? Mr. Vertigo? And is this dog really a dog? For most of the novel, you get the sense that Mr. Bones is no different from a human, only wiser. Mr. Auster is right to gamble that a dog can be a good narrator, picking up our idle speech, the detritus of our conversations. And when this dog is in fact a dog, the writing is very strong. Here's Mr. Bones preparing to attack a flock of pigeons: "He paused, not wanting to stir up any suspicions, trying to blend into the surroundings.… He was scarcely breathing by then, scarcely moving a muscle, and yet off to his right, at the outer edge of the flock, half a dozen pigeons suddenly flapped their wings and took off into the air … and Mr. Bones, who until then had exercised the strictest, most admirable self-control, could think of nothing better to do than leap to his feet and rush after his victim."

But when Mr. Bones stops being a dog–and becomes a philosopher of the highest order– Timbuktu falters. Why is it that Mr. Bones fully understands English–including the complex immigrant history of Willy's grandparents from Warsaw through France and across the Atlantic–but doesn't realize he's about to get neutered? If, according to the book, all a dog can care about is "food, sex, and information about other dogs," why does Mr. Bones' philosophy of suicide make Schopenhauer's look simplistic by comparison? And how does a dog untangle the knots of a spoonerism?

To answer such questions, we would require a novel as cunning and loyal–in short, as canine–as Paul Auster's prior works. Alas, Timbuktu is a formal experiment that cannot meet its demands. The house of fiction, as Henry James designed it, may indeed have a million windows, but this dog has been left out in the yard.

A cinephile who became a film critic who became a filmmaker, François Truffaut remained always a cinephile at heart. He made 21 films in 24 years, a long celluloid love letter to the movies. His passion for film was matched by an unending adoration of women. But since Truffaut only fell for actresses, his romances seem like a subset of his cinephilia, as if each woman in his life were a starlet from a favorite Hollywood picture, or a doomed heroine from one of his own loving creations.

Truffaut loved America, too, and this month America is returning his affection. On April 23, Film Forum begins its complete, two-month retrospective of Truffaut's films. By total coincidence, Knopf has just published the translation of Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana's much-acclaimed Truffaut biography. Those two events fit together even more perfectly than you might think. On the one hand, we have films of an intensely autobiographical nature: To see Truffaut's films is, in effect, to read his biography. On the other hand, we have a book whose central message about François Truffaut is that his life had the intrigue, symmetry and despair of his best movies. Whether on the screen or on the page, Truffaut's story is mesmerizing.

Born in 1932 to an unwed Catholic mother and (as he would find out much later) a Jewish father, who promptly disappeared, Truffaut spent a mostly miserable childhood in Paris. Resentful of his mother, bored at school, an iconoclast by age 8, François fell into petty thievery and street mischief. But soon he found a more enduring, though no less stealthy, hobby. "I saw my first 200 films on the sly," Truffaut wrote, "playing hooky and slipping into the movie house without paying … I paid for these great pleasures with stomachaches, cramps, nervous headaches and guilty feelings, which only heightened the emotions evoked by the films." As his biographers note, "love of cinema represented a pocket of resistance in the culture of the period." When he was sent to juvenile hall for theft and debt at age 16, "he asked his parents only for a bit of jam, and his files on Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles."

His cinephilia bordered on madness. Between 1940 and 1955, he saw 4,000 films.

Then came his evolution into the François Truffaut of legend–the street ruffian movie-lover who became the hoodlum of the Parisian film criticism scene. He was short, with dark brown eyes, but it was his fearlessness that earned him the nickname "Napoleon." With the help of the famous critic André Bazin, he began to write for the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma . (Messrs. de Baecque and Toubiana are the current editors.) Along with other young critics–and future New Wave filmmakers–Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, Truffaut rose to prominence by attacking the stodgy French cinema of his day. His writing was the critical equivalent of a Molotov cocktail. To Claude Autant-Lara, one of the most popular directors of the 50's, Truffaut was "that young thug of journalism." Another director, Jean Delannoy, was so dumbfounded by one of Truffaut's blitzes that he sent him a letter: "What you wrote … is so low that I have never encountered anything like it in my 20 years in the profession. You've just broken a record."

His notoriety aside, Truffaut's most enduring contribution as a critic was his articulation of a deceptively simple notion: the auteur theory. We throw the term around so carelessly today that it's easy to forget Truffaut's original vision. Inspired by the work of Roberto Rossellini, Fritz Lang and most of all Alfred Hitchcock, Truffaut appealed to moviegoers to concentrate on a filmmaker's entire body of work when watching any one film. From that vantage point, the auteur theory insists that "bad" movies be considered fundamental to an auteur's special genius. As Messrs. de Baecque and Toubiana explain, "Every auteur film becomes the story of a failure, of perfection sacrificed; and only the whole body of his work, retracing a personal, unique journey, can allow us to understand an auteur." Truffaut's theory was a canny strategy. Before he had shot a roll of film, he had written a brilliant apologia for himself–for he himself would make plenty of mediocre and bad movies in his career. Do you think Jules and Jim is a terrible film? That's Truffaut's genius: Only an auteur could make such an epic stinker!

Truffaut had his work cut out for him when he laid down his pen to enter the profession he had terrorized for a decade. He didn't disappoint. His first two features, The 400 Blows (1959) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960) are hypnotic visions, confessional in tone but as elusive as the American masterpieces Truffaut revered. They marked something unprecedented in the history of movies: a cinema born from within a society of critics. By 1965, the major documents of the New Wave had been unleashed: Truffaut's early films, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows , Mr. Rivette's Paris nous appartient , Mr. Godard's Breathless , Pierrot le fou and Alphaville .

The most fascinating relationship in this book–one that lurks under the surface of much of the narrative–is the friendship between Truffaut and Mr. Godard. The two began as New Wave comrades struggling for a new method of filmmaking; Truffaut wrote the screenplay for Breathless , Mr. Godard's first feature. They fought together on the 1968 barricades, which provide some of the most extraordinary passages in the book: "Truffaut, severely shaken, was cared for in the entranceway to a building. Godard, stunned, looked for his lost sunglasses; [Bernard] Tavernier had blood dripping down his face; Yves Boisset's wife had been thrown to the ground." Two months later, in the heat of the May '68 fury, "Godard was slapped in the face and once again lost his glasses; Truffaut was tackled at the waist and thrown to the floor by an angry audience member." Reading such anecdotes, you begin to wonder: Where are the independent filmmakers shedding blood today?

It was not long before the friendship with Mr. Godard soured. Messrs. de Baecque and Toubiana use the rift to trace Truffaut's tilt toward the bourgeoisie: While Mr. Godard grew more and more political, Truffaut's films showed his gradual surrender to Hollywood: squeaky-clean production, traditional narrative and sexy actresses (a true pantheon of French beauties, all of whom he slept with: Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Claude Jade, Fanny Ardant and the half-French Jacqueline Bisset).

Before long, Mr. Godard was deriding Truffaut as the kind of complacent director they used to scorn together. Truffaut was "a businessman in the morning and a poet in the afternoon"; "he made one film that truly expressed him, The 400 Blows , and that was it: Afterward, he merely told stories." By the 1973 release of Truffaut's Day for Night , his movie most reverential of movies, Mr. Godard declared that Truffaut had sold out for good. His cinephilia, according to Mr. Godard, had killed his urgency; he had become a "liar." Truffaut responded: "I've always felt that true militants are like cleaning women, performing a thankless, daily, necessary task. But you, you're like Ursula Andress, you make a four-minute appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash … and then you disappear." Years later, he imagined Mr. Godard's "next autobiographical film, whose title I think I know: Once a Shit Always a Shit ."

Much to Mr. Godard's dismay, Truffaut had become what he had in fact always been: a cinephile through and through. His days of thuggery were over. As an ambassador from the nation of Cinema, Truffaut became in 1970's France (and until 1984, when a brain tumor killed him at age 52) what Martin Scorsese is in America today: reverent and diplomatic, an encyclopedia of the cinema's history, customs and society. This remarkable, thorough, but coolly composed biography makes you wonder whether Truffaut's ultimate legacy will be not as a filmmaker, or even as a brilliant critic, but rather as someone who loved the movies. Perhaps a bit too much.