The story is told in the charming, light, witty style of the kind endemic to British comic novels, leading us to expect it to unwind in the way of such plotty, fluent confections. Further, it comes with a publishing back-story: Initially issued in an edition of 750, after many rejections, by an obscure French art press, its early history seems a parable of the evils of commercial publishing. Then an editor at big American Vintage came across it and loved it, and it arrives on reviewers’ desks trailing movie rights and critical praise from the British press and early reviews here.

If I’d encountered one of those 750 copies, I too would have felt righteous outrage at the state of publishing—but maybe for only the first two-thirds of the book.

Our hero-narrator wants simply to feel natural again, the way he did before walking or eating had to be constructed acts with worked-on stages and moves. How will his millions help?

In a bathroom at a party, the image of a time he can’t specify pierces him with joy and urgency. His settlement allows him to re-create in reality this scene that appeared so inexplicably in memory, and to that end he buys a building resembling the one in his vision, has it remodeled, fills it with “re-enactors” to mimic this moment of unplaceable memory, and then spends hours gazing at light crossing the stairs, or repeatedly greeting a resident, to capture those instants when his blighted present seems to converge with his unimpaired past.

You anticipate some revelation when, about halfway through, he has his building up and running: So far, the obsessions, while narrated with humor, have an atmosphere of masturbation and fetish, literalizing the Freudian observation that neurosis recruits others to re-enact the dramas that define us, in this case in a rhapsody of autism. However, the narrator just goes on to create new re-enactments, which increasingly involve simulated street crime. You foresee his ruination.

French literary theory has been invoked in praise of this novel (the author’s previous book is called Tintin and the Secret of Literature), as well as Camus’ The Stranger. Be that as it may, in the end Remainder leaves you feeling tricked into cozy sympathy with a character who proves uncaring and vacuous.

Anna Shapiro is the author of a collection of essays and three novels. Her most recent, Living on Air (Soho), will be out in paperback in May.

Though Ms. Munro has burrowed into town records, inspected graveyards, and read family letters and diaries, articles in a previous century’s Blackwood’s and family members’ manuscripts, and though she assures us that, where her own life and character are concerned, nothing is made up, this is not a unified factual history like Francine du Plessix Gray’s magnificent epic of archival investigation, reportage and recall, Them: A Memoir of Parents, or Doris Lessing’s forthright and compendious two-volume autobiography, in which she virtually indexes every person from whom she has borrowed traits for characters, thereby only deepening the mystery of her power to make those characters live in our own imaginations. Ms. Munro presents a mixture of memoir, history and invention: “These are stories,” she emphatically claims.

Readers will want to prize out the many incidents in The View from Castle Rock recognizable from short stories that Ms. Munro has published over the past four decades, but there’s no saying which details are factual. This indeterminacy made me want to read the biography of Alice Munro listed in the bibliography of the new Everyman’s Library selection of her stories, Carried Away, and also the memoir published by her eldest daughter. At least that’s what I wanted as a reviewer; as a devoted fan, I just wanted to read Carried Away and to savor the most Munrovian sections, so to speak, of The View from Castle Rock: the ones that have the sickly glitter and thrill of perverse behavior, the intimacy of emotion, and the sinking through layers of perception and reversals of perspective—layers that are coherent but contradictory and seem to be the very stuff of experience.

Those are the hallmarks of the best Alice Munro fiction, and they were all on display in the sections of The View from Castle Rock excerpted in The New Yorker: the major, stunning portion of the title story, about the shipboard journey of the 19th-century Scots patriarch and his family to Canada; “The Ticket,” about a scholarship girl’s preparations for a marriage that will remove her from her unaspiring rural class; “Fathers,” about a friendship enforced between the smart farm girl and a much more indulged and nurtured child from Chicago; “Hired Girl,” about a job as teenage housekeeper in a wealthy summer home; and “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” in which a Salvation Army soldier is anything but salvation for the bookish teenage girl he regularly makes out with.

In The New Yorker, these stories seemed entirely of a piece with the two major flavors of Alice Munro’s best work: either autobiographical in tone or her own brand of historical fiction. (When Ms. Munro delves into a particular historical period, her characters have none of the generic or stilted qualities that usually damn the genre, nor do they have any silly proximity to figures of great public consequence.)

“The Ticket,” for instance, doesn’t seem more autobiographical than the stories in The Beggar Maid (1978), essentially about the same scholarship girl ambivalently marrying the same well-off boy, here called Michael. But the major characters, in the way Ms. Munro comes at that train wreck of a marriage in “The Ticket,” are a grandmother and an Aunt Charlie. Even if prototypes for these two actually existed, I doubt that their marriages did, at least not in the forms described in this story. Those forms are the story: the kindly aunt’s mythically happy match, the legendary and hidden ins-and-outs of the grandmother’s love for the man whose brother she married. Knowing whether any of this in fact happened to Ms. Munro’s granny (or whether Michael is in fact James Armstrong Munro, the man Ms. Munro married in 1951) could not make the story better or worse or more tense, disturbing and wonderful. What makes literary art is not the source material but the art, the shape given to it by the author. If biography is what you’re after, The View from Castle Rock will only taunt you.

The title story doesn’t seem any closer to personal history than, say, earlier Munro fictions like “Meneseteung,” with its excerpts from a coy small-town newspaper and lines of an old maid’s flowery verse made moving by the historical context Ms. Munro invents for it. “The View from Castle Rock” incorporates entries from a journal kept by a Munro ancestor on a trans-Atlantic voyage—a journal that’s both touching and comic in the way it fails to record the life-changing emotional detonations all around. Those are the events that make it a story, and Ms. Munro must have had to invent them all. The fact that the characters bear the names of Ms. Munro’s ancestors, or that she scans their visitable (I think) tombstones to deduce their later histories, has nothing to do with their grip on us. We’re hooked by familial provocations recognizably captured; by the evocation of delirium and physical misery in a life of unplannable pregnancy and un­medicated childbirth; by the psychic journey each family member makes toward an emotional promised land. That journey—here and always—is Ms. Munro’s great subject: The journey toward the happier place, and the fear or possibility or certainty that, in making it, you have split yourself and left behind what mattered to you.

The sharpest difference I felt between this quasi-memoir and the purer storytelling for which Alice Munro is justly celebrated has to do with that split. If you cobble together certain moments in The View from Castle Rock—where the narrator as a teenager tucks in her mother, who has Parkinson’s, and cooks for her brother and sister, or subdues herself to please her blue-collar father, who wrote fiction at the end of his life and had married a schoolteacher—you get a glimpse of what could have been a very different kind of autobiography, with the author as noble heroine and her parents as tragic characters out of Jude the Obscure. But Ms. Munro’s best short stories glory in a lack of gentility, or present an excruciation of callousness among the genteel, and there’s a gleeful highlighting of the shameful at the expense of anyone who has aspirations—as if, as an author, she takes the part of the crudest people she grew up with, the harshest part of the life she escaped, to jeer at the person she wanted to become; as if, as the jeerer, she can hold onto what’s been left behind.

At the end of The View from Castle Rock, she remembers holding to her ear a seashell and hearing “the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea”—in counterpoint to and in harmony with the voyage of her forebears. The author of that sentiment, the author of the memoir and history and autobiography gathered here, doesn’t seem split and certainly does not jeer. She’s calm and a little magisterial, as if she hadn’t spent a lifetime writing about a struggle both to avoid the hurts of love and, at the same time, to honor love and grasp its pleasures. In nonfiction, you can take as your subject the sense of having multiple personalities that make you write fiction, but you can’t manifest your storyteller’s kittens-in-a-sack personality as a cast of different characters, and you can’t write in a Babel of voices. Perhaps Alice Munro’s overtly autobiographical “I”—less animating, more like that of any number of intelligent and talented but not superlative writers—reflects a balance she’s achieved through writing superlative fiction.

Anna Shapiro is the author of a collection of essays and three novels. Her most recent, Living on Air (Soho), will be out in paperback in May.

Though Ms. Munro has burrowed into town records, inspected graveyards, and read family letters and diaries, articles in a previous century’s Blackwood’s and family members’ manuscripts, and though she assures us that, where her own life and character are concerned, nothing is made up, this is not a unified factual history like Francine du Plessix Gray’s magnificent epic of archival investigation, reportage and recall, Them: A Memoir of Parents, or Doris Lessing’s forthright and compendious two-volume autobiography, in which she virtually indexes every person from whom she has borrowed traits for characters, thereby only deepening the mystery of her power to make those characters live in our own imaginations. Ms. Munro presents a mixture of memoir, history and invention: “These are stories,” she emphatically claims.

Readers will want to prize out the many incidents in The View from Castle Rock recognizable from short stories that Ms. Munro has published over the past four decades, but there’s no saying which details are factual. This indeterminacy made me want to read the biography of Alice Munro listed in the bibliography of the new Everyman’s Library selection of her stories, Carried Away, and also the memoir published by her eldest daughter. At least that’s what I wanted as a reviewer; as a devoted fan, I just wanted to read Carried Away and to savor the most Munrovian sections, so to speak, of The View from Castle Rock: the ones that have the sickly glitter and thrill of perverse behavior, the intimacy of emotion, and the sinking through layers of perception and reversals of perspective—layers that are coherent but contradictory and seem to be the very stuff of experience.

Those are the hallmarks of the best Alice Munro fiction, and they were all on display in the sections of The View from Castle Rock excerpted in The New Yorker: the major, stunning portion of the title story, about the shipboard journey of the 19th-century Scots patriarch and his family to Canada; “The Ticket,” about a scholarship girl’s preparations for a marriage that will remove her from her unaspiring rural class; “Fathers,” about a friendship enforced between the smart farm girl and a much more indulged and nurtured child from Chicago; “Hired Girl,” about a job as teenage housekeeper in a wealthy summer home; and “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” in which a Salvation Army soldier is anything but salvation for the bookish teenage girl he regularly makes out with.

In The New Yorker, these stories seemed entirely of a piece with the two major flavors of Alice Munro’s best work: either autobiographical in tone or her own brand of historical fiction. (When Ms. Munro delves into a particular historical period, her characters have none of the generic or stilted qualities that usually damn the genre, nor do they have any silly proximity to figures of great public consequence.)

“The Ticket,” for instance, doesn’t seem more autobiographical than the stories in The Beggar Maid (1978), essentially about the same scholarship girl ambivalently marrying the same well-off boy, here called Michael. But the major characters, in the way Ms. Munro comes at that train wreck of a marriage in “The Ticket,” are a grandmother and an Aunt Charlie. Even if prototypes for these two actually existed, I doubt that their marriages did, at least not in the forms described in this story. Those forms are the story: the kindly aunt’s mythically happy match, the legendary and hidden ins-and-outs of the grandmother’s love for the man whose brother she married. Knowing whether any of this in fact happened to Ms. Munro’s granny (or whether Michael is in fact James Armstrong Munro, the man Ms. Munro married in 1951) could not make the story better or worse or more tense, disturbing and wonderful. What makes literary art is not the source material but the art, the shape given to it by the author. If biography is what you’re after, The View from Castle Rock will only taunt you.

The title story doesn’t seem any closer to personal history than, say, earlier Munro fictions like “Meneseteung,” with its excerpts from a coy small-town newspaper and lines of an old maid’s flowery verse made moving by the historical context Ms. Munro invents for it. “The View from Castle Rock” incorporates entries from a journal kept by a Munro ancestor on a trans-Atlantic voyage—a journal that’s both touching and comic in the way it fails to record the life-changing emotional detonations all around. Those are the events that make it a story, and Ms. Munro must have had to invent them all. The fact that the characters bear the names of Ms. Munro’s ancestors, or that she scans their visitable (I think) tombstones to deduce their later histories, has nothing to do with their grip on us. We’re hooked by familial provocations recognizably captured; by the evocation of delirium and physical misery in a life of unplannable pregnancy and un­medicated childbirth; by the psychic journey each family member makes toward an emotional promised land. That journey—here and always—is Ms. Munro’s great subject: The journey toward the happier place, and the fear or possibility or certainty that, in making it, you have split yourself and left behind what mattered to you.

The sharpest difference I felt between this quasi-memoir and the purer storytelling for which Alice Munro is justly celebrated has to do with that split. If you cobble together certain moments in The View from Castle Rock—where the narrator as a teenager tucks in her mother, who has Parkinson’s, and cooks for her brother and sister, or subdues herself to please her blue-collar father, who wrote fiction at the end of his life and had married a schoolteacher—you get a glimpse of what could have been a very different kind of autobiography, with the author as noble heroine and her parents as tragic characters out of Jude the Obscure. But Ms. Munro’s best short stories glory in a lack of gentility, or present an excruciation of callousness among the genteel, and there’s a gleeful highlighting of the shameful at the expense of anyone who has aspirations—as if, as an author, she takes the part of the crudest people she grew up with, the harshest part of the life she escaped, to jeer at the person she wanted to become; as if, as the jeerer, she can hold onto what’s been left behind.

At the end of The View from Castle Rock, she remembers holding to her ear a seashell and hearing “the tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea”—in counterpoint to and in harmony with the voyage of her forebears. The author of that sentiment, the author of the memoir and history and autobiography gathered here, doesn’t seem split and certainly does not jeer. She’s calm and a little magisterial, as if she hadn’t spent a lifetime writing about a struggle both to avoid the hurts of love and, at the same time, to honor love and grasp its pleasures. In nonfiction, you can take as your subject the sense of having multiple personalities that make you write fiction, but you can’t manifest your storyteller’s kittens-in-a-sack personality as a cast of different characters, and you can’t write in a Babel of voices. Perhaps Alice Munro’s overtly autobiographical “I”—less animating, more like that of any number of intelligent and talented but not superlative writers—reflects a balance she’s achieved through writing superlative fiction.

Anna Shapiro is the author of a collection of essays and three novels. Her most recent, Living on Air (Soho), will be out in paperback in May.

The title threw me: Nora Ephron has a beautiful neck, a long neck. She’s a swan. Then I read the title piece: Now in her 60’s, Ms. Ephron has acquired a scar above her collarbone, but, mainly, it’s her throat that makes her feel bad. It has become crêpey, saggy, wattled. Writing these essays like a Joan Rivers with better values, she deplores having to bear the signs of age, the maintenance required to counteract them, and the impossibility of succeeding in counteracting them. She likewise deplores those who would say such losses are made up for by wisdom gained, and deploys a fair amount of wisdom anyway on subjects ranging from parenthood to home decoration and handbags. Along the way, some losses are even revealed to be no such thing, as in this deadpan nugget: “The empty nest is underrated.”

One could say: Hey, we all have to put up with decline—what’s she complaining about? It would be especially easy to feel enviously grudging reading “The Story of My Life in 3,500 words or Less,” which telegraphs a history that’s a string of triumphs, from winning first prize in high school for an essay on “Why I Want to Be a Journalist” to becoming one on first try—at 22—to writing a best-seller upon turning to fiction, then writing the screenplay for the cultural landmark When Harry Met Sally (1989).

But Ms. Ephron disarms jealousy by mocking her own anguish in a style that veers between hey-girlfriend coziness and wit that has everything to do with good writing. Her sentences are informed as much by Randall Jarrell as by shtick—sentences like “You have to cut a redwood tree open to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.”

So that string of triumphs is, in the girlfriend mode, cast as victories snatched by luck from the jaws of defeat, or at least insecurity: She won the essay prize only after the teacher nixed her lead; the best-seller came from the despair of being betrayed by an adored husband in her seventh month of pregnancy; and the cultural landmark was the distillation of youthful fears and loneliness. She seems always to be saying, “I’m just one of the girls.”

She brings the skills of a novelist to this claim, so you do identify, even if your accommodations to femininity take different forms. I’m not the kind of person whose pocketbook is full of capless lipsticks, loose Tic Tacs or gray-bristled toothbrushes (all this from “I Hate My Purse”), but I recognize “tampons that have come loose from their wrappings” and “Kleenexes that either have or have not been used but there’s no way to be sure one way or another”—even as I protest against the accuracy of what she’s writing. (She’s admitted defeat; I’m still battling.)

Likewise, my medicine cabinet is not full of expensive face creams, partly because they’re expensive but mostly because, until the laboratories can give me something that mimics what elastin did for my face, I don’t want to be gulled by the hope of even small improvement. I don’t spend the eight hours a week on exercise, tweezing, manicure and so on (catalogued with exasperation but also breezy satisfaction in “On Maintenance”), but I’d probably be glad to have a hair-threader (and time to devote to all those activities), though my experience with a pedicurist named Olga (“Tsk, tsk, tsk, vy you no push down cuticle?”) put me off that little luxury.

The point is, Ms. Ephron has me in her pocket. I’m absolutely on her side and feel that she’s on mine, that we’re in this together.

As, indeed, we all are. But I experience a kind of double vision, or impatient disappointment, when I read some of these essays, not because of their funniness and warmth and zingily brilliant observation, but because someone this smart knows she’s not just writing about vanity or even grief—as when she registers her biggest losses, to death, in “Considering the Alternative.” What she’s really writing about is the insult to our identity that we suffer when we see that unfamiliar face in the mirror—pouchy, crumpling—a face that’s too strong and exaggerated to be our own, and that also seems to have, with all those dark, complicated areas, too many features. It’s different as well as worse: It’s not who we are.

She writes about regret throughout these pieces (“ Je regrette beaucoup,” she wonderfully says in “Considering the Alternative”), but I felt frustrated at the insistence on jokiness that forced this truly smart woman into a pose of superficiality. The unbearable thing is for life to get worse. It’s not a matter of what things are in themselves (pretty much okay, not so bad, better than for some people, for almost all people), but for life to be worse today than it was yesterday. I’m not asking her to be Susan Sontag, but I don’t want the woman who wrote Scribble Scribble (1978)—and who was one of the first women to direct pictures in Hollywood—to pretend to be Erma Bombeck either, even just for a sentence here and there, and certainly not for a freelancer’s fee.

Is it that these pieces were for magazines that won’t allow a serious idea through the door? Maybe not. Two of the best, “Serial Monogamy: A Memoir” and “Moving On” (canny about the New York obsessions of real estate and styles of cooking, respectively), were first published The New Yorker—and still I wanted more. On the other hand, two of the pieces that to me represent Nora Ephron at her best take the pose of the miffed would-be girlfriend—someone who has only affectional concerns—to comment on larger matters. Both were New York Times Op-Ed pieces.

Interestingly, I only remembered the shocker from “Me and JFK,” the piece on Kennedy’s affair with White House aide Mimi Fahnestock that first appeared, in slightly altered form, in The Times (“think about that long, long list of women JFK slept with. Were any of them Jewish? I don’t think so”), and not the final sentences, so rich, so superb: “And now, like Mimi Fahnestock, I will have no further comment on this subject. I request that the media respect my privacy and that of my family.” The other Op-Ed piece is a reproach to Bill Clinton for failing to speak out against the war in Iraq, a reproach so oblique and take-back-your-mink-ish in tone that, in contrast to the offense, it has the power of a mallet.

Ms. Ephron has done reporting, fabulously, and she’s used material from her own past for fiction. In her under-3,500-word autobiography, she quotes E.L. Doctorow: “[T]here is no fiction or nonfiction ... there is only narrative.” Whether fiction or non-, however, her wonderful, entertaining narratives lose the kick of seriousness when the subject is your pal Nora Ephron, but I suspect it doesn’t have to be that way—if she lives and writes long enough. “On Rapture” is a lovable paean to reading novels, and yet in “The Lost Strudel or Le Strudel Perdu,” she admits that she can never get past the first chapter of Proust. Remembrance of Things Past! An encyclopedia of loss—and of a cherishing, akin to regret, of all that time sweeps away. Nora! Don’t start with the first chapter! Start with the third volume: It’s a circular novel, it won’t matter. You’ll love it, trust me.

Anna Shapiro writes about reading, Remembrance of Things Past and cooking in her collection of essays A Feast of Words (W.W. Norton). Her most recent book is the novel Living on Air (Soho).

The title threw me: Nora Ephron has a beautiful neck, a long neck. She’s a swan. Then I read the title piece: Now in her 60’s, Ms. Ephron has acquired a scar above her collarbone, but, mainly, it’s her throat that makes her feel bad. It has become crêpey, saggy, wattled. Writing these essays like a Joan Rivers with better values, she deplores having to bear the signs of age, the maintenance required to counteract them, and the impossibility of succeeding in counteracting them. She likewise deplores those who would say such losses are made up for by wisdom gained, and deploys a fair amount of wisdom anyway on subjects ranging from parenthood to home decoration and handbags. Along the way, some losses are even revealed to be no such thing, as in this deadpan nugget: “The empty nest is underrated.”

One could say: Hey, we all have to put up with decline—what’s she complaining about? It would be especially easy to feel enviously grudging reading “The Story of My Life in 3,500 words or Less,” which telegraphs a history that’s a string of triumphs, from winning first prize in high school for an essay on “Why I Want to Be a Journalist” to becoming one on first try—at 22—to writing a best-seller upon turning to fiction, then writing the screenplay for the cultural landmark When Harry Met Sally (1989).

But Ms. Ephron disarms jealousy by mocking her own anguish in a style that veers between hey-girlfriend coziness and wit that has everything to do with good writing. Her sentences are informed as much by Randall Jarrell as by shtick—sentences like “You have to cut a redwood tree open to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck.”

So that string of triumphs is, in the girlfriend mode, cast as victories snatched by luck from the jaws of defeat, or at least insecurity: She won the essay prize only after the teacher nixed her lead; the best-seller came from the despair of being betrayed by an adored husband in her seventh month of pregnancy; and the cultural landmark was the distillation of youthful fears and loneliness. She seems always to be saying, “I’m just one of the girls.”

She brings the skills of a novelist to this claim, so you do identify, even if your accommodations to femininity take different forms. I’m not the kind of person whose pocketbook is full of capless lipsticks, loose Tic Tacs or gray-bristled toothbrushes (all this from “I Hate My Purse”), but I recognize “tampons that have come loose from their wrappings” and “Kleenexes that either have or have not been used but there’s no way to be sure one way or another”—even as I protest against the accuracy of what she’s writing. (She’s admitted defeat; I’m still battling.)

Likewise, my medicine cabinet is not full of expensive face creams, partly because they’re expensive but mostly because, until the laboratories can give me something that mimics what elastin did for my face, I don’t want to be gulled by the hope of even small improvement. I don’t spend the eight hours a week on exercise, tweezing, manicure and so on (catalogued with exasperation but also breezy satisfaction in “On Maintenance”), but I’d probably be glad to have a hair-threader (and time to devote to all those activities), though my experience with a pedicurist named Olga (“Tsk, tsk, tsk, vy you no push down cuticle?”) put me off that little luxury.

The point is, Ms. Ephron has me in her pocket. I’m absolutely on her side and feel that she’s on mine, that we’re in this together.

As, indeed, we all are. But I experience a kind of double vision, or impatient disappointment, when I read some of these essays, not because of their funniness and warmth and zingily brilliant observation, but because someone this smart knows she’s not just writing about vanity or even grief—as when she registers her biggest losses, to death, in “Considering the Alternative.” What she’s really writing about is the insult to our identity that we suffer when we see that unfamiliar face in the mirror—pouchy, crumpling—a face that’s too strong and exaggerated to be our own, and that also seems to have, with all those dark, complicated areas, too many features. It’s different as well as worse: It’s not who we are.

She writes about regret throughout these pieces (“Je regrette beaucoup,” she wonderfully says in “Considering the Alternative”), but I felt frustrated at the insistence on jokiness that forced this truly smart woman into a pose of superficiality. The unbearable thing is for life to get worse. It’s not a matter of what things are in themselves (pretty much okay, not so bad, better than for some people, for almost all people), but for life to be worse today than it was yesterday. I’m not asking her to be Susan Sontag, but I don’t want the woman who wrote Scribble Scribble (1978)—and who was one of the first women to direct pictures in Hollywood—to pretend to be Erma Bombeck either, even just for a sentence here and there, and certainly not for a freelancer’s fee.

Is it that these pieces were for magazines that won’t allow a serious idea through the door? Maybe not. Two of the best, “Serial Monogamy: A Memoir” and “Moving On” (canny about the New York obsessions of real estate and styles of cooking, respectively), were first published The New Yorker—and still I wanted more. On the other hand, two of the pieces that to me represent Nora Ephron at her best take the pose of the miffed would-be girlfriend—someone who has only affectional concerns—to comment on larger matters. Both were New York Times Op-Ed pieces.

Interestingly, I only remembered the shocker from “Me and JFK,” the piece on Kennedy’s affair with White House aide Mimi Fahnestock that first appeared, in slightly altered form, in The Times (“think about that long, long list of women JFK slept with. Were any of them Jewish? I don’t think so”), and not the final sentences, so rich, so superb: “And now, like Mimi Fahnestock, I will have no further comment on this subject. I request that the media respect my privacy and that of my family.” The other Op-Ed piece is a reproach to Bill Clinton for failing to speak out against the war in Iraq, a reproach so oblique and take-back-your-mink-ish in tone that, in contrast to the offense, it has the power of a mallet.

Ms. Ephron has done reporting, fabulously, and she’s used material from her own past for fiction. In her under-3,500-word autobiography, she quotes E.L. Doctorow: “[T]here is no fiction or nonfiction ... there is only narrative.” Whether fiction or non-, however, her wonderful, entertaining narratives lose the kick of seriousness when the subject is your pal Nora Ephron, but I suspect it doesn’t have to be that way—if she lives and writes long enough. “On Rapture” is a lovable paean to reading novels, and yet in “The Lost Strudel or Le Strudel Perdu,” she admits that she can never get past the first chapter of Proust. Remembrance of Things Past! An encyclopedia of loss—and of a cherishing, akin to regret, of all that time sweeps away. Nora! Don’t start with the first chapter! Start with the third volume: It’s a circular novel, it won’t matter. You’ll love it, trust me.

Anna Shapiro writes about reading, Remembrance of Things Past and cooking in her collection of essays A Feast of Words (W.W. Norton). Her most recent book is the novel Living on Air (Soho).

Following a beautiful and moving epigraph by Robert Pinsky (a poem about the Triangle fire, the exploitation of early mill workers and the shirt he’s putting on), the novel starts with an account by the surviving sister, one Esther Auerbach Gottesfeld. Her story is presented as an article that appeared in a 1961 Ladies Garment Workers booklet, which may really exist. (Ms. Weber’s own grandmother was a button finisher at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co.) The description of young women struggling to get out of the firetrap building—suffocating, turned to human torches or jumping to certain death—is wrenching. That’s the burlap.

The next stage of piecework, much longer, will inevitably feel trivial after such trauma, a big flounce of chiffon. It’s about a contemporary composer of whom the following claims are made: “Genius flowed from George Botkin”; his music is “unlike any music, unlike anything anyone had ever made on earth before”; and “Everyone recognized that George Botkin’s music was overwhelmingly beautiful.” Not only this, but his piece “Parturition” seems to induce labor, “Echinacea Serenade” is used in “holistic healing centers,” and a composition based on lymphosarcoma polypeptide patterns causes headaches and bad temper. Not only have you left the visceral and real, you’re in a fantasyland where Ted Turner casually commissions a piece for a million dollars, talking like Popeye: “I loves me some violins.”

It emerges that we’re hearing about nice, equable George because he’s the boyfriend of Rebecca, granddaughter of Esther Gottesfeld, who is, at this point (in September of 2001), 106 years old and in a Greenwich Village nursing home. Poor Esther is being repeatedly interviewed by a scholar named Ruth Zion, who doubts her story: Ruth wants to know why only Esther and her boss escaped from the fire through a door that otherwise remained locked. We hear Esther’s immigrant’s tale of leaving Belarus with her sister Pauline, being cheated and being helped, outwitting danger and enjoying the freedom of earning money, however grudgingly paid.

Esther also reveals that she was pregnant by her fiancé, Sam, whose name she took, though Sam died with his arms around non-fiancée Pauline, jumping out a window on the ninth floor, where the fire escapes had collapsed and the exit door opened inward, sealed by the crowd pressed against it. From Esther’s angry and evasive answers, you soon deduce that Esther must really be Pauline and that there was something between her and the boss who unlocked the door.

A mystery story has emerged, a story of mistaken identity, secret payoffs, connivance and greed—or maybe of rape and reparations.

Then Esther, last witness to the fire, lets go of the life she’s hung onto with such tenacity. The mystery is left to be more or less solved, and the right sleeve joined, by the opening of a safe-deposit box that Rebecca inherits and through some more indirect narrative: an article about George, in which it’s revealed that he wrote a piece based on his and Rebecca’s DNA patterns that “will never be performed publicly”; and a report on the performance of another one of George’s compositions.

That composition is called the Triangle Oratorio. Most improbably for a post-tonal, quasi-aleatory composer, it’s program music; even less probably, it’s programmed with such explicitness that it can fill in the last gaps of the story. Thus is the froufrou of fantasy joined to the burlap of historicist naturalism.

Esther’s story is finally a version of An American Tragedy, in which Esther has the part Shelley Winters played in the movie but gets to look like Elizabeth Taylor (and, along with her baby, live). Her voice is gratifyingly familiar, a crabby, Yiddish-inflected vernacular that’s precious because it’s vanishing, barely to be found anymore outside of Flatbush.

As for the book’s pretenses on behalf of music, that’s probably a matter of taste. My ability to suspend disbelief was pulled past its limit almost immediately. Ms. Weber also means to force a parallel between her narrative method and music, which I also find as strained as the language of the epigraph she uses to highlight it: “the listener has no way of apperceiving the music as a whole other than by recreating it in his own imagination.” I suffered through language like that during the years I lived with a composer, also a Yale graduate student in music, just like the young George Botkin. It’s just a fancy way of saying that the reader (unlike a listener, if you think about it) fills in a story’s missing parts.

Some of the parts, in this case, are not as fine as others, but they’re arranged by a skilled literary gameswoman, and they play to the involuntarily amoral capacity of every reader to have fun fitting them together.

Anna Shapiro is the author of Living on Air (Soho), published last month, as well as two other novels and an essay collection.

Following a beautiful and moving epigraph by Robert Pinsky (a poem about the Triangle fire, the exploitation of early mill workers and the shirt he’s putting on), the novel starts with an account by the surviving sister, one Esther Auerbach Gottesfeld. Her story is presented as an article that appeared in a 1961 Ladies Garment Workers booklet, which may really exist. (Ms. Weber’s own grandmother was a button finisher at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co.) The description of young women struggling to get out of the firetrap building—suffocating, turned to human torches or jumping to certain death—is wrenching. That’s the burlap.

The next stage of piecework, much longer, will inevitably feel trivial after such trauma, a big flounce of chiffon. It’s about a contemporary composer of whom the following claims are made: “Genius flowed from George Botkin”; his music is “unlike any music, unlike anything anyone had ever made on earth before”; and “Everyone recognized that George Botkin’s music was overwhelmingly beautiful.” Not only this, but his piece “Parturition” seems to induce labor, “Echinacea Serenade” is used in “holistic healing centers,” and a composition based on lymphosarcoma polypeptide patterns causes headaches and bad temper. Not only have you left the visceral and real, you’re in a fantasyland where Ted Turner casually commissions a piece for a million dollars, talking like Popeye: “I loves me some violins.”

It emerges that we’re hearing about nice, equable George because he’s the boyfriend of Rebecca, granddaughter of Esther Gottesfeld, who is, at this point (in September of 2001), 106 years old and in a Greenwich Village nursing home. Poor Esther is being repeatedly interviewed by a scholar named Ruth Zion, who doubts her story: Ruth wants to know why only Esther and her boss escaped from the fire through a door that otherwise remained locked. We hear Esther’s immigrant’s tale of leaving Belarus with her sister Pauline, being cheated and being helped, outwitting danger and enjoying the freedom of earning money, however grudgingly paid.

Esther also reveals that she was pregnant by her fiancé, Sam, whose name she took, though Sam died with his arms around non-fiancée Pauline, jumping out a window on the ninth floor, where the fire escapes had collapsed and the exit door opened inward, sealed by the crowd pressed against it. From Esther’s angry and evasive answers, you soon deduce that Esther must really be Pauline and that there was something between her and the boss who unlocked the door.

A mystery story has emerged, a story of mistaken identity, secret payoffs, connivance and greed—or maybe of rape and reparations.

Then Esther, last witness to the fire, lets go of the life she’s hung onto with such tenacity. The mystery is left to be more or less solved, and the right sleeve joined, by the opening of a safe-deposit box that Rebecca inherits and through some more indirect narrative: an article about George, in which it’s revealed that he wrote a piece based on his and Rebecca’s DNA patterns that “will never be performed publicly”; and a report on the performance of another one of George’s compositions.

That composition is called the Triangle Oratorio. Most improbably for a post-tonal, quasi-aleatory composer, it’s program music; even less probably, it’s programmed with such explicitness that it can fill in the last gaps of the story. Thus is the froufrou of fantasy joined to the burlap of historicist naturalism.

Esther’s story is finally a version of An American Tragedy, in which Esther has the part Shelley Winters played in the movie but gets to look like Elizabeth Taylor (and, along with her baby, live). Her voice is gratifyingly familiar, a crabby, Yiddish-inflected vernacular that’s precious because it’s vanishing, barely to be found anymore outside of Flatbush.

As for the book’s pretenses on behalf of music, that’s probably a matter of taste. My ability to suspend disbelief was pulled past its limit almost immediately. Ms. Weber also means to force a parallel between her narrative method and music, which I also find as strained as the language of the epigraph she uses to highlight it: “the listener has no way of apperceiving the music as a whole other than by recreating it in his own imagination.” I suffered through language like that during the years I lived with a composer, also a Yale graduate student in music, just like the young George Botkin. It’s just a fancy way of saying that the reader ( unlike a listener, if you think about it) fills in a story’s missing parts.

Some of the parts, in this case, are not as fine as others, but they’re arranged by a skilled literary gameswoman, and they play to the involuntarily amoral capacity of every reader to have fun fitting them together.

Anna Shapiro is the author of Living on Air (Soho), published last month, as well as two other novels and an essay collection.

And yet I found Ms. Ozick’s appreciation so left-handed (Sontag’s 1963 novel reads like a “stilted translation”; her politics were reflexive; the aesthetic principles that made her famous were abominable) that I was laughing at the idea that it was meant as tribute. Let me say here that I don’t disagree with Ms. Ozick’s judgments. I, too, had to struggle against the kind of art Sontag espoused (I practically wept reading my paperback of Against Interpretation); I hated Sontag’s early novels; and if I sympathized with Sontag’s political views, I was often derisive about the Joan of Arc manner that went with them. But I don’t think I’d voice these reservations through, as it were, my tears. Over the years, she changed, and so did I.

Ms. Ozick was reconciled to Sontag because she “recanted”: Her last novels were traditional. But this reconciliation reads as anything but. Ms. Ozick spends pages blaming Sontag (in gorgeous writing)—not for valorizing a cold, astringent modernist aesthetic that was never going to be for the masses, but for admitting popular culture into the realms of high art. After going back into Sontag’s essays myself and rereading the Ozick several times, what was clearest was that this wasn’t a reasoned argument against the Susan Sontag of 1965, whose book is all about artists like Resnais and Ionesco, with only a few lines about pop, but rather the last word in a public argument—a parting shot in the culture wars waged by the Commentary crowd. Ms. Ozick was quoting from obituary notices in The New York Times and The New Yorker, not from what Sontag wrote—which, while allowing that you can appreciate Dionne Warwick complexly, still insists on distinctions between good art and bad.

This blame is unseemly in a memorial tribute—maybe it’s little more than the complaint of a girl who feels square next to the cool girl—and also unfair. (I prefer to blame the degradation of the arts on politicians who empower corporations and elevate the profit motive over all other values, so that, for instance, just as insurance-company earnings trump the medical needs of individuals, how many copies a book can sell out-shouts how a better book may speak to well-read people.) But the point here is that it isn’t readily apparent why Ms. Ozick allowed her anger to show.

The key is extra-textual: In essay after essay in this volume, she’s bleeding for what is happening and has happened to erode the quality of literature and of literary appreciation—and, boy, I could not be more with her—but she also seems to be carrying on an argument that long preceded any given essay and is not explicitly stated within it.

Some of the authors she writes about, it seems to me, were chosen for where they are on the political and religious spectrum (the Commentary ideology frowns on secularism and supports Israel as a religious state). I’d love to believe she wrote about Bellow (an intimate of the Chicago school that produced neoconservatism) and his old friend Delmore Schwartz out of sheer love of their work; or about Robert Alter’s translation of the Old Testament solely for its (acknowledged) wonderfulness—but I rather unwillingly notice that even what she writes in praise of John Updike has a taint of unstated, unacknowledged ideology. That doesn’t make it less amusing or astute when she observes that Mr. Updike’s “sexual scenes seem as distanced and skeptical as a lapsed seminarian’s meticulously recited breviary, while his God-seeking passages send out orgasmic shudders.” It’s fine if she approves this because she’s a believer and herself wants religion to be sexy: Ideological writing can have a place in literary criticism. I just want it to be very clear when we’re reading about an aesthetic or psychological issue, and when it’s politics. I don’t want to give her my cordwood to chop if she’s just grinding an ax.

Let me immediately say that every essay in The Din in the Head is worth reading. If anything, you wish that the pieces were longer, that they’d been allowed, within the protection of book covers, to expand from their magazine origins. When Ms. Ozick brings her powers of description to Tolstoy, Henry James, Lionel Trilling, it’s a thrilling ride, slightly rollercoaster-ish as she swoops down on the enemies of unfettered imagination. She champions Kipling, a writer whose uncritical colonialism has for too long obscured the brilliance of his anthropology and the compassion with which he drew his characters. Her piece on Helen Keller as a writer is educational even for the generation that remembers her autobiography and the documentary films about her; the essay is warm and humorous, as well as fiercely protective.

Ms. Ozick’s sentences are excitable, practically tripping over with their suitcases and bundles of ideas. Really, she’s too vehement a thinker and imaginer to rein herself in with anything like a party line. I’m sorry if my praise comes too much from the left hand! It remains the case that readers will be richer for every minute they spend with this book.

Anna Shapiro’s third novel, Living on Air (Soho), was published last month.

And yet I found Ms. Ozick’s appreciation so left-handed (Sontag’s 1963 novel reads like a “stilted translation”; her politics were reflexive; the aesthetic principles that made her famous were abominable) that I was laughing at the idea that it was meant as tribute. Let me say here that I don’t disagree with Ms. Ozick’s judgments. I, too, had to struggle against the kind of art Sontag espoused (I practically wept reading my paperback of Against Interpretation); I hated Sontag’s early novels; and if I sympathized with Sontag’s political views, I was often derisive about the Joan of Arc manner that went with them. But I don’t think I’d voice these reservations through, as it were, my tears. Over the years, she changed, and so did I.

Ms. Ozick was reconciled to Sontag because she “recanted”: Her last novels were traditional. But this reconciliation reads as anything but. Ms. Ozick spends pages blaming Sontag (in gorgeous writing)—not for valorizing a cold, astringent modernist aesthetic that was never going to be for the masses, but for admitting popular culture into the realms of high art. After going back into Sontag’s essays myself and rereading the Ozick several times, what was clearest was that this wasn’t a reasoned argument against the Susan Sontag of 1965, whose book is all about artists like Resnais and Ionesco, with only a few lines about pop, but rather the last word in a public argument—a parting shot in the culture wars waged by the Commentary crowd. Ms. Ozick was quoting from obituary notices in The New York Times and The New Yorker, not from what Sontag wrote—which, while allowing that you can appreciate Dionne Warwick complexly, still insists on distinctions between good art and bad.

This blame is unseemly in a memorial tribute—maybe it’s little more than the complaint of a girl who feels square next to the cool girl—and also unfair. (I prefer to blame the degradation of the arts on politicians who empower corporations and elevate the profit motive over all other values, so that, for instance, just as insurance-company earnings trump the medical needs of individuals, how many copies a book can sell out-shouts how a better book may speak to well-read people.) But the point here is that it isn’t readily apparent why Ms. Ozick allowed her anger to show.

The key is extra-textual: In essay after essay in this volume, she’s bleeding for what is happening and has happened to erode the quality of literature and of literary appreciation—and, boy, I could not be more with her—but she also seems to be carrying on an argument that long preceded any given essay and is not explicitly stated within it.

Some of the authors she writes about, it seems to me, were chosen for where they are on the political and religious spectrum (the Commentary ideology frowns on secularism and supports Israel as a religious state). I’d love to believe she wrote about Bellow (an intimate of the Chicago school that produced neoconservatism) and his old friend Delmore Schwartz out of sheer love of their work; or about Robert Alter’s translation of the Old Testament solely for its (acknowledged) wonderfulness—but I rather unwillingly notice that even what she writes in praise of John Updike has a taint of unstated, unacknowledged ideology. That doesn’t make it less amusing or astute when she observes that Mr. Updike’s “sexual scenes seem as distanced and skeptical as a lapsed seminarian’s meticulously recited breviary, while his God-seeking passages send out orgasmic shudders.” It’s fine if she approves this because she’s a believer and herself wants religion to be sexy: Ideological writing can have a place in literary criticism. I just want it to be very clear when we’re reading about an aesthetic or psychological issue, and when it’s politics. I don’t want to give her my cordwood to chop if she’s just grinding an ax.

Let me immediately say that every essay in The Din in the Head is worth reading. If anything, you wish that the pieces were longer, that they’d been allowed, within the protection of book covers, to expand from their magazine origins. When Ms. Ozick brings her powers of description to Tolstoy, Henry James, Lionel Trilling, it’s a thrilling ride, slightly rollercoaster-ish as she swoops down on the enemies of unfettered imagination. She champions Kipling, a writer whose uncritical colonialism has for too long obscured the brilliance of his anthropology and the compassion with which he drew his characters. Her piece on Helen Keller as a writer is educational even for the generation that remembers her autobiography and the documentary films about her; the essay is warm and humorous, as well as fiercely protective.

Ms. Ozick’s sentences are excitable, practically tripping over with their suitcases and bundles of ideas. Really, she’s too vehement a thinker and imaginer to rein herself in with anything like a party line. I’m sorry if my praise comes too much from the left hand! It remains the case that readers will be richer for every minute they spend with this book.

Anna Shapiro’s third novel, Living on Air (Soho), was published last month.

The story begins with a classic setup, the stranger coming to town. We know little about him: He’s a “nomenclature consultant,” very successful but full of mystery. He’s left the firm he worked for, for reasons unknown, and he walks with a limp from a recent but unspecified injury. We gather that he’s African-American (or “black” or a “person of color”—there’s ironic commentary on the changeability and unsatisfactoriness of that nomenclature), but we don’t know what race means to him. In fact, we don’t even know his name (a bit too cute, that). Let’s play “nomenclature consultant” and brand our hero with an X.

Two of the town’s three councilors want to change the town’s name. That, too, is mysterious, so that X is like Philip Marlowe as he goes from one quirky character to the next trying to learn about the place and its history—which, it emerges, is all about race and branding too.

At the moment, the town is called Winthrop, and so is nearly everything else, from the hotel to the dissenting town councilor, Albie Winthrop, who would naturally prefer to keep the name as it is. The mayor, Regina Goode—who is also a councilor, and descended from one of the town’s two black founders—wants to go back to the name they, both former slaves, chose: Freedom. The third councilor, Lucky Aberdeen, C.E.O. of Aberdeen Software, wants a name that will attract businesses: He favors the moniker that X’s former firm came up with, New Prospera. Much is made of a law regarding the town’s naming—another mystery, but one infers that it allows the name to be changed by any two of the three councilors. X is therefore a kind of arbitrator, though he’s free to come up with any name at all.

Weirdly, X reacts to almost everyone and everything—even libraries—with sour disapproval and world-weariness. The tone of mockery bordering on sarcasm is perhaps understandable in reference to the product that made the town’s name, so to speak: Winthrop barbed wire. To recap: A town named Freedom, founded by former slaves, was renamed after a brand of barbed wire, a synecdoche for unfreedom. But Albie Winthrop (who’s white) is hardly a symbol of unearned wealth and hegemony. Though he has a baronial mansion, its rooms are empty, stripped by the wife who left him. Of Winthrop Lane, which led from the pier to the factory, Albie says, “Probably want to change the name of the road, too. It’s like they want to erase it all.”

Erasing is the point. The product-naming that made X’s name (whatever that might be) is Apex, a brand of adhesive bandage that comes in 20 shades so as not to “add insult to injury.” Now you know why “Apex hides the hurt.” (The slogan is so catchy it turns up with comic twists on nightly TV.) And now you’re going to find out why X limps: He stubbed his toe and then kept stubbing his toe, so badly that it began to rot and had to be amputated. He never noticed how bad the toe was getting because he kept covering it with Apex, which blended so well that he overlooked the injury.

X scoffs at the name Freedom because it, too, hides the hurt: “Must have been a bitch,” he thinks, “to travel all that way only to realize that they forgot to pack the subtlety.” Presumably, the thing X keeps stubbing his toe on is black American history, which his personal history papers over: He’s a graduate of Quincy College (they “believed in diversity”) as well as a star in the branding business. X clearly loathes his old firm, which hired him because he was a “Quincy man.”

He also loathes the pathetic Albie and seems to have no warmer feelings for Regina. X is contemptuous of her attractive body, which looks as if it was achieved through “StaySlim,” and her acceptance of corporate values as a necessary evil. His contempt for Lucky Aberdeen, the advocate of “New Prospera,” is more understandable. For one, Lucky (who’s also white) always wears a western-style studded vest and is bluffly hail-fellow-well-met, with all the falseness that implies. For another, he’s a booster of big business. But his “product” is also prosperity and multiculturalism. To X, that’s simply a Benetton ad.

“Apex hides the hurt”—the slogan overlooks a central quality of pain, which is that it has little to do with appearances and nobody fails to notice it when they feel it. The kind of naming X is paid for may be all about smoothing over felt reality, but in life, as opposed to marketing, that doesn’t erase anything. It’s only easy to conceal pain from the outside. Naming, however, in the sense of articulating, is very much about bringing the hidden to the surface, which is what X achieves in his investigative Marlowe role: He uncovers a long-hidden dispute between the founders about the town’s name, a dispute that speaks to the issue of whether these ex-slaves really found freedom or not. Whether this revelation will be satisfying enough for readers is another question.

It’s a problem that X doesn’t like or care about anyone or anything. The only people he comes across who might represent the struggle he finally decides is at the heart of the matter are a black hotel barkeeper and his chambermaid wife, yet X experiences them as harassing and judgmental, and he goads and judges and dislikes them in turn. His detachment flattens whatever humor there might be and muffles resonance.

X embodies the very problem that he (in an only-to-be-inferred way) diagnoses: Have racism and capitalism sucked the authentic feeling out of everything, including this man? Personally, I’m allergic to cool, to uninflected low affect and nonchalance. If they’re meant to invoke something noirish, it’s Marlowe minus the honor and pleasure in discovering like-mindedness. Readers not looking for direct emotional access to the characters may find it gratifying to solve the intellectual puzzle set here by Colson Whitehead (a MacArthur fellow, wouldn’t you know). But in my experience, hurt makes for emotional heat.

Anna Shapiro’s third novel, Living on Air, will be published by Soho Press in May.