Now here’s a pretty fairy tale: The hero is reasonably handsome, chronically kind, invariably sensitive, excruciatingly honorable, infallibly Ivy League—and he helps invent the hedge fund! What a prince! What a savior of mankind.

Have you ever met a hedge-funder like that? I thought so.

Let us be clear—or let James Collins be clear, which he certainly is in this first novel, whether analyzing stocks or human heartbreak—young New Yorker Peter Russell’s breakthrough insights are not considered by his creator to be financial. They are minted instead when the girl of his dreams—or at least his social and romantic calculations—makes him a winner at the perilous game of airplane seat bingo: On a flight to Los Angeles, they fall in love-at-first-sight. Though they agree to meet again, he screws up, she marries someone else, that someone else is his best friend, his best friend dies the night of Peter’s wedding and—innumerable clever portraits of countless related characters later—Mr. Collins awards Beginner’s Greek the ending it has earned.

Peter thinks he’s the pawn of the ancient gods and the curly coiffed Fates he would have learned about in prep school, but what does he know of a coolly watchful authorial presence?

Mr. Collins’ character sketches are nicely Louis Auchincloss (who, after all, must be in want of a successor), with the requisite amount of Jane Austen to please the gals, enough light-touched financial lingo to hook i-bankers stuck in the Admiral’s Club and a conscience sufficiently informed by history and irony to note that the great Wall Street firm Peter works for was founded, among other things, on the slave trade.

But loose biographical briefs they remain. Heavens, no—not briefs as in undergarments. The men in Mr. Collins’ Blue Book world wear only boxers, just as “all of Peter’s pajamas seemed to have blue stripes,” and all the right women have long necks and terrific hair and moments of vulnerability.

AS NOTED, MR. COLLINS is a first-time novelist, and the pearls on this necklace could have done with tighter stringing by an editorial hand. They hang together irregularly, with gaps of filler prose, suddenly interrupted at times also by less polished passages that have some interesting things to say about love, parents, mourning rituals and even Mr. Collins’ cartoonish villain (he’s short, probably went to the wrong schools, and tortures Peter).

Perhaps the gamble was this: Mr. Collins has been other things successfully—an editor and writer for Spy and Time, a corporate financier, a sociable Manhattanite—why not give him his head in writing fiction?

He has acquitted himself admirably as far as a potentially commercial entertainment is concerned. But as the phrase went in the days before e-mail, parts of his novel seem to have been phoned in.

It’s as if, in steering toward the heart of a WASP authenticity, Mr. Collins had bypassed his emotionally familiar haunts and ended up instead on ye olde estate of Ralph Lauren in the northern reaches of Westchester County. Those goods sell, but at what price?

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer in New York. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

Another precinct heard from.

In it lounges Danielle Ganek, who, as one-half of a powerful collecting couple (her husband is hedge-funder David Ganek), isn’t the most obvious candidate to write a novel stripping the paint off the art world.

Maybe because Ms. Ganek tarried while younger in the grungier trenches of Woman’s Day and Mademoiselle, though, her Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him manages to descend just a few notches from the Olympian heights of chauffeur-driven gallery-hopping and museum galas. The fiction lifted from her current life by this very much former style editor also mixes it up with Chelsea dealers’ assistants (“gallerinas”) and working artists, scholarly sellouts and mishandled art handlers, unscrupulous auctioneers and, most noticeably, a coterie of collectors so awful it’s depressing. The book is a nice corrective to today’s financial run-up masquerading as a passion for art.

May we present Mia McMurray, reluctant employee of the struggling Simon Pryce gallery? She has a weakness for bad-bet men and a hidden clutch of unfinished paintings she keeps telling herself means she’s really an artist. Mia is not alone in having a secret agenda: Her boss’ gamble on an unknown, middle-aged American expatriate painter—who conveniently and mysteriously dies just as his sensational first show opens—sets off a series of intrigues and a stampede of reprehensible behavior. Much of it swirls around Lulu, the dead guy’s long-lost relation, captured as a child in his giant masterpiece, Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him.

Mia likes to talk endlessly about all of this—the style of the book is in-your-face-conversational—except (sometimes) during her steamy interludes in bed with a gentleman who may or may not turn out to be the hunk of her dreams. Her chattiness veers toward one-liners that go well with canapés and champagne. One collector is “so far uptown, he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.” There’s a party at a restaurant “over the border in Germany, where the elusive white asparagus is in season for only a short time that happens to coincide with Art Basel.”

Mia mounts a stalwart defense of hedge funds (what girl wouldn’t?), and then lets us know that buying and selling pricey paintings “is the last bastion of legal insider trading.” When she opines about art, on the other hand, she gets all thick and Kantian.

Just in case potential readers might miss the fact that the genre this book sensibly belongs to is chick lit, its cover type and spine are hot pink, and its dénouement ruefully romantic. Though treating a novel too much like an artifact could be construed as materialistic—or a frivolous allusion to art as appropriation—don’t miss the bonus entertainment of flipping to the backside of the book, which is adorned with quotes from such literary authorities as Larry Gagosian and Vera Wang. Better to have blurbed this book than to be skewered by it.

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer who lives in New York.

What if a Lethem novel were to do for L.A. what Motherless Brooklyn did for Brooklyn—make it more real, more variegated, more autobiographical than the place itself? Since he’s reworked his life growing up in the not-Manhattan again and again—with diminishing freshness—it was definitely time for a change. You Don’t Love Me Yet takes a flyover to the coast sinister in the 80’s, when Mr. Lethem was living there and playing in a rock band. On the cover of the novel is a photo of an anorexic young Johnny with earring and guitar; inside is his portrait of the faltering and the fameless.

They’re an insouciant bunch, trailing names in the Henry James vein (Lucinda Hoekke, Matthew Plangent, Rhodes Bramlett, Fancher Autumnbreast), and I’d swear that the opening scene, in which Lucinda and Matthew meet in the neutral space of a museum lobby to break up for the umpteenth time, cribs from James’s story “Julia Bride.” (They end up having sex inside a Conceptual artwork—so not The Master.)

That impromptu love shack is an early piece by Lucinda’s friend and employer Falmouth Strand, who has now moved on to more interactive art installations. Lucinda’s job, along with the other assistants in his gallery space, is to take notes from her conversations with callers phoning in over a “complaint line.” (The telephone number is helpfully included.)

Where You Don’t Love Me Yet pretty successfully gets the reader is inside the group life of an aspiring alt-rock band, its rehearsals and its gigs, its ambitions and uneven talents, its flash-in-the-pan hits and sexual crushes of only slightly longer duration—at one point, Matthew, a part-time zookeeper, romantically kidnaps a depressed kangaroo. There are other kooky and well-aimed moments of comic relief, which help make up for the occasional character selections from central casting.

Where it gets Lucinda is into an intense new affair with her favorite “complainer,” an older man of substantial means and the requisite Hollywood sleaze quotient. Matthew’s obvious opposite, he’s made a fortune writing slogans, most likely among them the freeway rallying cry “You can’t be deep without a surface,” the perfect war whoop for the self-serious. But Mr. Lethem doesn’t belabor the old saw of a superficial Hollywood Babylon (though he also knows his Nathanael West—Lucinda as Miss Lonelyhearts, anyone?), lighting instead on the slippery meeting points of the make-believe, the actual and their strenuously jaded go-betweens.

Maybe it’s a 21st-century thing, but you can’t always count on Mephistopheles to keep his end of the bargain. Is that such a bad thing? The band will find out. Sometimes, passable lyrics come out of it—and, in this case, an entertaining novel.

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer who lives in New York.

Some families are more successful at this than others, though, no matter what, hidden things fester. Like the wide-open spaces that still punch up the outlines of fiction for many American writers (home is left, home is returned to, a lot of emotion is expended coming to terms with both ends of the long journey), the keeping of secrets is good for shaping stories. What’s a home without a basement?

In Goodbye Lemon, Jack (short for Jackson) Tennant comes from a family where silence has been cultivated more avidly still than the indestructible roses in his mother’s garden (“a time capsule of landscaped anguish”) back in the faux-rural hunt country of suburban Maryland, and polished to a metallic gleam as impenetrable as the shine of the Jaguar E-type that his father, Colonel Tennant, sir, keeps garaged away against any sharing with his two sons.

But Adam Davies is determined to muddy the distinction between what once happened and the tricks your mind plays when you push the memory aside. Where there are now two Tennant sons there were once three, the middle child a 6-year-old named Dexter who drowned one summer vacation evening in Lake George when his mother was shopping, his brothers were following their usual whims, and his father wasn’t saving him. Dexter’s parents don’t just bury him, they erase every memory and avoid any mention.

Jack, the youngest, flees eventually, first aiming for a piano scholarship to Juilliard that his father negates with physical violence. Later he makes it to graduate school in New York, only to self-destruct with a little help from a stalker student. Spiraling his way downward, he takes a part-time college-teaching gig in “Boll Weevil, Georgia,” and supplements that with bottom-feeding work at a homeless shelter. His ray of hope is his girlfriend, a staff social worker at the center who’s on her way up out of a far tougher background than his. But now the Colonel has gone and had a stroke that results in Locked-In Syndrome, a total and usually fatal paralysis of the body that imprisons the mind within. Jack heads home for the first time in 15 years.

Home is left (Jack calls it “The Suicide Palace”) and returned to.

Jack is an older, sadder, schlumpier, more failed, more emotionally raw version of Harry Driscoll, the disastrous preppie publishing gofer in The Frog King, Mr. Davies’ debut novel. Jack’s brother Pressman is stewed in alcohol (in The Frog King it was heroin), and so is the Colonel, though the father is an aboveground zombie of chilly, Great Santini–like rectitude, while his older son, who lasted all of two weeks of a freshman year on a designated golden-boy scholarship to a college in Northern California, has literally hit rock bottom, a “vice frigate” holed up in the cellar with occasional forays to the local alkie dive and its bad company.

There are other repetitions between Mr. Davies’ first and second novels: tiny but assertive girlfriend, check; horrendous medical condition conveyed in clinical, nightmarish detail, check; soft spot for pre-adolescent waifs, check; fireflies as metaphor, check; obsession with obscure vocabulary and ingenuity with transforming verbs into nouns, check, check.

The last is particularly pronounced once Jack falls off the wagon thanks to good old Press, Jack’s increasingly uncertain feelings about his father and a hereditary involvement with alcohol that has hidden complications up its seersucker sleeve. The more sodden the psyche, the more scintillating the interior monologue. This makes for winsome prose, but how it lines up with the solid, incontrovertible realities that Mr. Davies requires for the pivot of his plot is another matter. If only Jack’s verbal pyrotechnics would explode in lucid moments and not when he’s incapacitated by a binge.

But that would ill serve Mr. Davies’ other goal, which is to illustrate—as he already did in The Frog King—that memory doesn’t just work in mysterious ways, it’s also an excuse to write a book. Both Harry Driscoll and Jack Tennant unburden themselves in the first-person singular on paper, it turns out. It’s a telling tribute to the value that Mr. Davies places on books as living organisms and fluid artifacts, but once would have been enough. In Goodbye Lemon, where a Ouija board, a Dynovox machine, a high-school yearbook and the Bell Atlantic Greater Baltimore Metropolitan White Pages also suggest that words speak louder than actions and volumes speak volumes, the billboard-quality preoccupation with the meta-literary wears almost too thin to carry the story.

But at least there is a story here, and that’s a sign that Mr. Davies’ talent has matured. He’s learned how to twist a plot and spring a surprise; his writing is the more grown-up and complex for it.

And he’s also deft enough to let Jack be funny. It’s hard not to like a follicly challenged WASP who describes what’s left of his bed-head hair as an “Angro,” or who leads his brother to liken the pickled beets their mother served them as kids to the architecture of Frank Gehry.

Moments like these make up for the movie-deal outcome that Mr. Davies may have had in mind with the book’s wrap-up—the epilogue to Goodbye Lemon is more suited to the Y.A. market. It’s sticky with unprocessed romanticism.

Adam Davies is still figuring out where not to lay it on too thick. The ground, though, is evening out beneath his feet.

Celia McGee is book critic who lives in New York.

Some families are more successful at this than others, though, no matter what, hidden things fester. Like the wide-open spaces that still punch up the outlines of fiction for many American writers (home is left, home is returned to, a lot of emotion is expended coming to terms with both ends of the long journey), the keeping of secrets is good for shaping stories. What’s a home without a basement?

In Goodbye Lemon, Jack (short for Jackson) Tennant comes from a family where silence has been cultivated more avidly still than the indestructible roses in his mother’s garden (“a time capsule of landscaped anguish”) back in the faux-rural hunt country of suburban Maryland, and polished to a metallic gleam as impenetrable as the shine of the Jaguar E-type that his father, Colonel Tennant, sir, keeps garaged away against any sharing with his two sons.

But Adam Davies is determined to muddy the distinction between what once happened and the tricks your mind plays when you push the memory aside. Where there are now two Tennant sons there were once three, the middle child a 6-year-old named Dexter who drowned one summer vacation evening in Lake George when his mother was shopping, his brothers were following their usual whims, and his father wasn’t saving him. Dexter’s parents don’t just bury him, they erase every memory and avoid any mention.

Jack, the youngest, flees eventually, first aiming for a piano scholarship to Juilliard that his father negates with physical violence. Later he makes it to graduate school in New York, only to self-destruct with a little help from a stalker student. Spiraling his way downward, he takes a part-time college-teaching gig in “Boll Weevil, Georgia,” and supplements that with bottom-feeding work at a homeless shelter. His ray of hope is his girlfriend, a staff social worker at the center who’s on her way up out of a far tougher background than his. But now the Colonel has gone and had a stroke that results in Locked-In Syndrome, a total and usually fatal paralysis of the body that imprisons the mind within. Jack heads home for the first time in 15 years.

Home is left (Jack calls it “The Suicide Palace”) and returned to.

Jack is an older, sadder, schlumpier, more failed, more emotionally raw version of Harry Driscoll, the disastrous preppie publishing gofer in The Frog King, Mr. Davies’ debut novel. Jack’s brother Pressman is stewed in alcohol (in The Frog King it was heroin), and so is the Colonel, though the father is an aboveground zombie of chilly, Great Santini–like rectitude, while his older son, who lasted all of two weeks of a freshman year on a designated golden-boy scholarship to a college in Northern California, has literally hit rock bottom, a “vice frigate” holed up in the cellar with occasional forays to the local alkie dive and its bad company.

There are other repetitions between Mr. Davies’ first and second novels: tiny but assertive girlfriend, check; horrendous medical condition conveyed in clinical, nightmarish detail, check; soft spot for pre-adolescent waifs, check; fireflies as metaphor, check; obsession with obscure vocabulary and ingenuity with transforming verbs into nouns, check, check.

The last is particularly pronounced once Jack falls off the wagon thanks to good old Press, Jack’s increasingly uncertain feelings about his father and a hereditary involvement with alcohol that has hidden complications up its seersucker sleeve. The more sodden the psyche, the more scintillating the interior monologue. This makes for winsome prose, but how it lines up with the solid, incontrovertible realities that Mr. Davies requires for the pivot of his plot is another matter. If only Jack’s verbal pyrotechnics would explode in lucid moments and not when he’s incapacitated by a binge.

But that would ill serve Mr. Davies’ other goal, which is to illustrate—as he already did in The Frog King—that memory doesn’t just work in mysterious ways, it’s also an excuse to write a book. Both Harry Driscoll and Jack Tennant unburden themselves in the first-person singular on paper, it turns out. It’s a telling tribute to the value that Mr. Davies places on books as living organisms and fluid artifacts, but once would have been enough. In Goodbye Lemon, where a Ouija board, a Dynovox machine, a high-school yearbook and the Bell Atlantic Greater Baltimore Metropolitan White Pages also suggest that words speak louder than actions and volumes speak volumes, the billboard-quality preoccupation with the meta-literary wears almost too thin to carry the story.

But at least there is a story here, and that’s a sign that Mr. Davies’ talent has matured. He’s learned how to twist a plot and spring a surprise; his writing is the more grown-up and complex for it.

And he’s also deft enough to let Jack be funny. It’s hard not to like a follicly challenged WASP who describes what’s left of his bed-head hair as an “Angro,” or who leads his brother to liken the pickled beets their mother served them as kids to the architecture of Frank Gehry.

Moments like these make up for the movie-deal outcome that Mr. Davies may have had in mind with the book’s wrap-up—the epilogue to Goodbye Lemon is more suited to the Y.A. market. It’s sticky with unprocessed romanticism.

Adam Davies is still figuring out where not to lay it on too thick. The ground, though, is evening out beneath his feet.

Celia McGee is book critic who lives in New York.

But with her second novel, Ms. Ali—like Mr. Ishiguro—is going all refusenik on the idea that writers of a certain background should take their origins as their exclusive subject matter. Instead, she’s chosen a very old-school form of British storytelling—the expat novel—with not a sari in sight. Noticeably on parade in the rural Portugal where she sets Alentejo Blue are the shades of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Paul Scott and Muriel Spark, all of whom plopped down their characters in exotic climes, which merely highlighted how very English they—and their habits, prejudices and foibles—were.

Contemporary English affluence has a very particular relationship with Portugal. From its declining villages, dying farms and unraveling towns—sadly beautiful all, in Ms. Ali’s telling—come many of the richer country’s domestic cleaners and baby-sitters, housekeepers and nannies, restaurant workers and day laborers. Ratty old England, as Ms. Ali knows to intimate, is their promised land. So just as the novel’s various tourists and exiles, petty criminals and blocked writers, engaged and disengaging couples migrate to the Alentejo (“The poorest region in the poorest country in the European Union,” as one of Ms. Ali’s jaded expatriates puts it), there are locals who dream of escape, crossing rocky paths with the visitors in an exchange of hopes and disillusion.

Pretty, ambitious Teresa is one with a flight plan, worriedly hiding the airmail letter offering her a job as a London nanny in the pocket of the sexy outfit she wears to dazzle the boyfriend she’s going to leave behind. He won’t be able to take it well: They’re surrounded as it is by women who have donned “widow’s black” because their husbands went abroad.

But Teresa is already halfway gone—functioning at a remove, she considers her “powers of observation … somehow keener than those of other people.”

She’s astute—understanding, for instance, that Senhor Vasco the restaurant owner, who once had his own adventure in America, is “building a wall of fat to conceal his deep, deep sadness,” or that her elegant mother will always favor her feckless brother over her. Yet many things also escape her, including the true complexion of the half-century-old friendship between two battered codgers.

That friendship draws to a brutal, despairing close with the episode that opens the book. It’s told in faux-Hemingway prose that Ms. Ali luckily soon jettisons, along with this Portuguese Brokeback Mountain scenario, which seems only to serve the purpose of slipping in the country’s history of fascism, dictatorship, failed collectivization and continuing domination by an invisible, omnipotent upper class. Another overly predictable detail is a native-son-made-good whose eagerly awaited return as economic savior makes not a wit of difference, except to get people thinking about the resort-hotel monstrosities for which they’d be more than willing to barter their ancestral lands.

The good earth is going bad. The old-timers in the cork-producing region are appalled by the advent of plastic stoppers, and gruesome incidents threaten the farm animals. The sense that some evil force has been tampering with nature seems unavoidable in a place where “most of the peach trees … were sick,” their fruit rotten at the core. The weather, for that matter, goes from blistering, cruel heat wave to dark, depressing, torrential downpours with barely a respite. (Not every prospect is grim: “ocher fields rose and fell gently as a lullaby,” and “the hills … seal away the world”—but the pretty pictures are rare and getting rarer.)

The most famous tourist site in the area is a medieval chapel built from the skulls of monks. At least one romance threatens to crash and burn there when a vacationing English banker and his bride-to-be confront their spiritual demons and each other in the middle of the spooky bones. Ms. Ali isn’t allowing anyone a vacation paradise. For several characters, this is more like the end of the road.

Attempting to weather the Alentejo’s extremes of mood and environment, the tawdry Potts family has stuck it out the longest of the foreigners. Squatters in a huddle of derelict caravans, the alcoholic father and self-destructive mother launch their deaf teenage daughter and lonely wisp of son on misadventures that can only end badly. Several of these involve—and sordidly implicate—a writer named Stanton, who’s holed up in this glamour-forsaken backwater so he can finish a novel about William Blake. But he’s easily distracted, unfortunately for the compatriots he encounters at his ringside seat in the local café. Stanton doesn’t know whether to be more scornful of types like the proper middle-aged couple negotiating their attitudes toward their gay son or of his own mounting failures as a writer, mentor and human being.

In his novel, Stanton is struggling to capture a Blake who’s not just an industrial-age visionary but also a passionate artist embarked on what Stanton calls “the country interlude.” Monica Ali has set herself a similar task by airlifting her gifts as a writer to a wildly distinctive and remote countryside. Her descriptive grasp of the landscape and the lives it breeds, as well as her feel for the village-square mentality in towns on the brink of change, take nothing for granted. Not so her deracinated Brits, who drive from place to place at too many kilometers per hour: They speed past her as she quick-sketches them, and they don’t entirely take shape. It’s not a question of subject matter; it’s a question of pace. Let’s hope Ms. Ali will slow down on the road ahead.

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer in New York.

But with her second novel, Ms. Ali—like Mr. Ishiguro—is going all refusenik on the idea that writers of a certain background should take their origins as their exclusive subject matter. Instead, she’s chosen a very old-school form of British storytelling—the expat novel—with not a sari in sight. Noticeably on parade in the rural Portugal where she sets Alentejo Blue are the shades of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Paul Scott and Muriel Spark, all of whom plopped down their characters in exotic climes, which merely highlighted how very English they—and their habits, prejudices and foibles—were.

Contemporary English affluence has a very particular relationship with Portugal. From its declining villages, dying farms and unraveling towns—sadly beautiful all, in Ms. Ali’s telling—come many of the richer country’s domestic cleaners and baby-sitters, housekeepers and nannies, restaurant workers and day laborers. Ratty old England, as Ms. Ali knows to intimate, is their promised land. So just as the novel’s various tourists and exiles, petty criminals and blocked writers, engaged and disengaging couples migrate to the Alentejo (“The poorest region in the poorest country in the European Union,” as one of Ms. Ali’s jaded expatriates puts it), there are locals who dream of escape, crossing rocky paths with the visitors in an exchange of hopes and disillusion.

Pretty, ambitious Teresa is one with a flight plan, worriedly hiding the airmail letter offering her a job as a London nanny in the pocket of the sexy outfit she wears to dazzle the boyfriend she’s going to leave behind. He won’t be able to take it well: They’re surrounded as it is by women who have donned “widow’s black” because their husbands went abroad.

But Teresa is already halfway gone—functioning at a remove, she considers her “powers of observation … somehow keener than those of other people.”

She’s astute—understanding, for instance, that Senhor Vasco the restaurant owner, who once had his own adventure in America, is “building a wall of fat to conceal his deep, deep sadness,” or that her elegant mother will always favor her feckless brother over her. Yet many things also escape her, including the true complexion of the half-century-old friendship between two battered codgers.

That friendship draws to a brutal, despairing close with the episode that opens the book. It’s told in faux-Hemingway prose that Ms. Ali luckily soon jettisons, along with this Portuguese Brokeback Mountain scenario, which seems only to serve the purpose of slipping in the country’s history of fascism, dictatorship, failed collectivization and continuing domination by an invisible, omnipotent upper class. Another overly predictable detail is a native-son-made-good whose eagerly awaited return as economic savior makes not a wit of difference, except to get people thinking about the resort-hotel monstrosities for which they’d be more than willing to barter their ancestral lands.

The good earth is going bad. The old-timers in the cork-producing region are appalled by the advent of plastic stoppers, and gruesome incidents threaten the farm animals. The sense that some evil force has been tampering with nature seems unavoidable in a place where “most of the peach trees … were sick,” their fruit rotten at the core. The weather, for that matter, goes from blistering, cruel heat wave to dark, depressing, torrential downpours with barely a respite. (Not every prospect is grim: “ocher fields rose and fell gently as a lullaby,” and “the hills … seal away the world”—but the pretty pictures are rare and getting rarer.)

The most famous tourist site in the area is a medieval chapel built from the skulls of monks. At least one romance threatens to crash and burn there when a vacationing English banker and his bride-to-be confront their spiritual demons and each other in the middle of the spooky bones. Ms. Ali isn’t allowing anyone a vacation paradise. For several characters, this is more like the end of the road.

Attempting to weather the Alentejo’s extremes of mood and environment, the tawdry Potts family has stuck it out the longest of the foreigners. Squatters in a huddle of derelict caravans, the alcoholic father and self-destructive mother launch their deaf teenage daughter and lonely wisp of son on misadventures that can only end badly. Several of these involve—and sordidly implicate—a writer named Stanton, who’s holed up in this glamour-forsaken backwater so he can finish a novel about William Blake. But he’s easily distracted, unfortunately for the compatriots he encounters at his ringside seat in the local café. Stanton doesn’t know whether to be more scornful of types like the proper middle-aged couple negotiating their attitudes toward their gay son or of his own mounting failures as a writer, mentor and human being.

In his novel, Stanton is struggling to capture a Blake who’s not just an industrial-age visionary but also a passionate artist embarked on what Stanton calls “the country interlude.” Monica Ali has set herself a similar task by airlifting her gifts as a writer to a wildly distinctive and remote countryside. Her descriptive grasp of the landscape and the lives it breeds, as well as her feel for the village-square mentality in towns on the brink of change, take nothing for granted. Not so her deracinated Brits, who drive from place to place at too many kilometers per hour: They speed past her as she quick-sketches them, and they don’t entirely take shape. It’s not a question of subject matter; it’s a question of pace. Let’s hope Ms. Ali will slow down on the road ahead.

Celia McGee is a book critic and arts writer in New York.

Ned Vizzini seemed to have outwitted that plan. Or that Plan—in the genre of high-school confidentials to which his writing belongs, capital letters throw up emotional signposts. (There’s apparently a cottage industry in these products at Stuyvesant High School, Mr. Vizzini’s alma mater: Four recent graduates have collaborated on The Notebook Girls, due out next month. Perhaps it’s the lingering influence of former Stuy writing teacher Frank McCourt.)

By chronicling his rocky high-school experiences, Mr. Vizzini sought to make them bearable. He one-upped the Plan. Starting at 15, he wrote well-regarded, funny, self-deprecating columns for The New York Press and The New York Times Magazine, worked up a standup act on the subject of himself and, after his pieces were collected six years ago in Teen Angst? Naaah … , developed a following on the secondary-school lecture circuit, where children of the striving, the rich and the richer turned to him as a self-help mirror of considerable comfort. He released a semi-autobiographical, science-fiction-ish novel, Be More Chill (2004), while enrolled at Hunter College. A Today Show Book Club anointing and post-high-school celebrity ensued.

But dude, crash, boom, crash. It turns out he had a breakdown and was hospitalized for five days at the end of 2004 in Park Slope’s Methodist Hospital, near where he grew up. He’s revealed as much on his Web site (of course he has a Web site); for good measure—and to great effect—he’s made his collapse the subject of a new novel.

Mr. Vizzini transplants his attempted high-five with suicide, grafting the ordeal onto a certain Craig Gilner, a freshman at Executive Pre-Professional High School. The school’s name may sound like a frivolous parody, but what Mr. Vizzini puts Craig through is not. The absurd seriousness of New York high schools is, as Craig might say, one of Mr. Vizzini’s spécialités.

Craig’s “Anchors”—the things that keep him stable—and his “Tentacles”—the haywire pressures of his own distorted ambitions—get dangerously confused. The worldview is The Little Mermaid on proto-yuppie steroids. Craig, and his insecurities, still wear a “child’s large,” and for emotional comfort he crawls into his mother’s bed.

Mr. Vizzini gives Craig a voice that’s warm, tragicomic and true, but his suicidal tendencies show up burdened with voicelessness. “It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself,” he remembers. “That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint—it’s a physical thing … [the words] come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”

Quietly, he observes the common decorating code of psychiatrists’ offices, the shared reading matter of madness, the disproportionate number of useless shrinks.

Mr. Vizzini wraps in the silence of solitary, self-effacing decision-making Craig’s unaccompanied venture to the local hospital and its psychiatric section, where due to construction snafus the only part open is the adult ward. It will come as no surprise to fans of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and other flipped lit that the language spoken on the ward is the sanity of the insane.

But the alternate society of Craig’s new compadres—which includes rather than excludes the hospital staff—escapes literary knockoff. Mr. Vizzini revels sympathetically in the indigenous Brooklyn populace: the schizophrenic, the hyperactively transgendered, the chronically homeless, the meth addicts, the docile Hasidic screamer, the sad-sack Egyptian suffering from a peculiarly Muslim mania as well as a musical longing that only Craig can sate.

To Craig, anything seems better than an outside world disembodied by cell phones and the free-floating lies they facilitate. He still worries about the deluge of untrustworthy, intrusive e-mails, afraid he’ll be smothered forever in a strait-jacket of unanswerable demands.

In teen terms, crises usually tend towards friends, sex and sex. Silence, like the kind afflicting Craig, is not the best way to untangle hormones from feelings, misunderstanding from deceit. Count on two girls—Nia the ninth-grade heartthrob and Noelle the pretty patient—to help him express himself, however haltingly and with the price of disappointed innocence thrown in.

This charting of life lessons propels Mr. Vizzini, tapped as a representative voice of his generation, to a moment that jolts the tale of gentle Craig. Boys, he tells Noelle, are arrogant because they “tend to have things a little bit easier than girls. And we tend to assume therefore that the world was built for us, and that we’re, you know, the culmination of everything that came before us. And then we get told that having a little bit of this attitude is called balls, and that balls are good, and we kind of take it from there.” So much for the idea that this age group is solving the battle of the sexes.

Yet there’s a tenderness hiding somewhere in almost all of Craig’s male contemporaries, heightened in his case—thanks to a good-egg family, the familiar self-deprecation and an open intelligence—into a desire to cheer up the world.

In the hospital, Craig rediscovers the delight he once took in drawing imaginary maps inspired by New York’s natural and manmade geography. He levels this passion at his fellow inmates (some of whom he insists he’ll be able to remain friends with): He maps their personalities. The prompt joy this delivers for him smacks a little too much of art therapy, and even the most unsophisticated teenager (are there any left?) will be unstartled to find that Craig’s life will now take a new turn. But the map that It’s Kind of a Funny Story traces of one reluctantly sweet kid’s mind and the extremes it bounces back from is well worth consulting.

Celia McGee is an arts writer and book critic in New York.

Ned Vizzini seemed to have outwitted that plan. Or that Plan—in the genre of high-school confidentials to which his writing belongs, capital letters throw up emotional signposts. (There’s apparently a cottage industry in these products at Stuyvesant High School, Mr. Vizzini’s alma mater: Four recent graduates have collaborated on The Notebook Girls, due out next month. Perhaps it’s the lingering influence of former Stuy writing teacher Frank McCourt.)

By chronicling his rocky high-school experiences, Mr. Vizzini sought to make them bearable. He one-upped the Plan. Starting at 15, he wrote well-regarded, funny, self-deprecating columns for The New York Press and The New York Times Magazine, worked up a standup act on the subject of himself and, after his pieces were collected six years ago in Teen Angst? Naaah … , developed a following on the secondary-school lecture circuit, where children of the striving, the rich and the richer turned to him as a self-help mirror of considerable comfort. He released a semi-autobiographical, science-fiction-ish novel, Be More Chill (2004), while enrolled at Hunter College. A Today Show Book Club anointing and post-high-school celebrity ensued.

But dude, crash, boom, crash. It turns out he had a breakdown and was hospitalized for five days at the end of 2004 in Park Slope’s Methodist Hospital, near where he grew up. He’s revealed as much on his Web site (of course he has a Web site); for good measure—and to great effect—he’s made his collapse the subject of a new novel.

Mr. Vizzini transplants his attempted high-five with suicide, grafting the ordeal onto a certain Craig Gilner, a freshman at Executive Pre-Professional High School. The school’s name may sound like a frivolous parody, but what Mr. Vizzini puts Craig through is not. The absurd seriousness of New York high schools is, as Craig might say, one of Mr. Vizzini’s spécialités.

Craig’s “Anchors”—the things that keep him stable—and his “Tentacles”—the haywire pressures of his own distorted ambitions—get dangerously confused. The worldview is The Little Mermaid on proto-yuppie steroids. Craig, and his insecurities, still wear a “child’s large,” and for emotional comfort he crawls into his mother’s bed.

Mr. Vizzini gives Craig a voice that’s warm, tragicomic and true, but his suicidal tendencies show up burdened with voicelessness. “It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself,” he remembers. “That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint—it’s a physical thing … [the words] come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”

Quietly, he observes the common decorating code of psychiatrists’ offices, the shared reading matter of madness, the disproportionate number of useless shrinks.

Mr. Vizzini wraps in the silence of solitary, self-effacing decision-making Craig’s unaccompanied venture to the local hospital and its psychiatric section, where due to construction snafus the only part open is the adult ward. It will come as no surprise to fans of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and other flipped lit that the language spoken on the ward is the sanity of the insane.

But the alternate society of Craig’s new compadres—which includes rather than excludes the hospital staff—escapes literary knockoff. Mr. Vizzini revels sympathetically in the indigenous Brooklyn populace: the schizophrenic, the hyperactively transgendered, the chronically homeless, the meth addicts, the docile Hasidic screamer, the sad-sack Egyptian suffering from a peculiarly Muslim mania as well as a musical longing that only Craig can sate.

To Craig, anything seems better than an outside world disembodied by cell phones and the free-floating lies they facilitate. He still worries about the deluge of untrustworthy, intrusive e-mails, afraid he’ll be smothered forever in a strait-jacket of unanswerable demands.

In teen terms, crises usually tend towards friends, sex and sex. Silence, like the kind afflicting Craig, is not the best way to untangle hormones from feelings, misunderstanding from deceit. Count on two girls—Nia the ninth-grade heartthrob and Noelle the pretty patient—to help him express himself, however haltingly and with the price of disappointed innocence thrown in.

This charting of life lessons propels Mr. Vizzini, tapped as a representative voice of his generation, to a moment that jolts the tale of gentle Craig. Boys, he tells Noelle, are arrogant because they “tend to have things a little bit easier than girls. And we tend to assume therefore that the world was built for us, and that we’re, you know, the culmination of everything that came before us. And then we get told that having a little bit of this attitude is called balls, and that balls are good, and we kind of take it from there.” So much for the idea that this age group is solving the battle of the sexes.

Yet there’s a tenderness hiding somewhere in almost all of Craig’s male contemporaries, heightened in his case—thanks to a good-egg family, the familiar self-deprecation and an open intelligence—into a desire to cheer up the world.

In the hospital, Craig rediscovers the delight he once took in drawing imaginary maps inspired by New York’s natural and manmade geography. He levels this passion at his fellow inmates (some of whom he insists he’ll be able to remain friends with): He maps their personalities. The prompt joy this delivers for him smacks a little too much of art therapy, and even the most unsophisticated teenager (are there any left?) will be unstartled to find that Craig’s life will now take a new turn. But the map that It’s Kind of a Funny Story traces of one reluctantly sweet kid’s mind and the extremes it bounces back from is well worth consulting.

Celia McGee is an arts writer and book critic in New York.

Why? Partly because the summer has been tiring for them: Mr. Holbrooke got his appointment from President Clinton in June and continued to jump around Europe. Ms. Marton went to Telluride, Colo., with her son, then joined her daughter on the European trip she'd given her for graduation from the Nightingale-Bamford School, then flew to Turkey, where, as designated representative of Human Rights Watch she had arranged to visit newly jailed dissident writer Ragib Duran and attempted to intercede with the Government on his behalf.

"Calling from Ankara," she said in one hurried message. "Spent the day with a man who has 13 bullets in his body, the head of the human-rights movement here, then I met with some people at the Foreign Ministry and told them about their shabby human rights record."

Mr. Holbrooke and Ms. Marton have no plans to see the Clintons on their home turf, unless, Ms. Marton said, "we just get one of those spontaneous phone calls" from the Presidential sleep-over at the Spielberg estate. But the couple's absence will do nothing to slow frenetic speculation about the position they are suddenly positioned to occupy at the peak of high-profile New York. Not since Adlai Stevenson was at the United Nations in the 1960's has the ambassadorial post been as ready to combine social prominence and diplomatic influence. Since the city's extended social life and its powerful pollinators abhor a vacuum, it's a good thing that the Holbrookes were around. Their separate plot lines have knotted into the first New York-based U.N. ambassadorship since Daniel Patrick Moynihan's. Other U.N. ambassadors have lived and entertained at the U.N. ambassador's suite in the Waldorf Towers–but the Holbrookes get to stay in their apartment at the Beresford, new home to Jerry Seinfeld.

What's more, the official U.N. residence where they will entertain may well transfer from the Waldorf Towers, leased for that purpose since 1947, to a larger place. Under consideration is a $27 million apartment in the Pierre Hotel, as well as space in Trump International Hotel and Tower, and the Trump World Tower. That rumor seeped after an assessment conducted by the U.N. Inspector General's office apparently indicated that the Waldorf quarters are no longer adequate. The purported apartment upgrade–confirmed by Calvin Mitchell, director of communications at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations–seemed in keeping with the ambitious streak commonly associated both with Mr. Holbrooke as well as with Ms. Marton, who, during a tumultuous 15-year marriage to ABC's Peter Jennings, stood by him straight to the top of the news anchor heap.

The Holbrookes have said they will stay in their apartment at the Beresford. Overlooking the park, now stuffed with Mr. Holbrooke's collection of Asian art, it was part of Ms. Marton's divorce settlement with Mr. Jennings; Mr. Holbrooke had already frequented the building during the period he co-habited with then-resident Diane Sawyer. The not-so-covert assumption regarding the official residence is that a grander space is desirable for a man driven to realize his tenacious dream of becoming Secretary of State.

Although his current professional incarnation is as vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston in New York, the Manhattan that matters has still tended to view Mr. Holbrooke as a creature of Washington, a Beltway peripatetic, a conversation topic at tedious Georgetown dinner parties, a traveling miracle worker from the Dayton Peace Accords to battle-roiled Kosovo. The U.N. appointment seemed to change all that. He and his wife of three years have become immediate candidates for the kind of gilt-edged couple encountered in one of his friend Ward Just's Whartonesque Eastern Corridor novels.

"It's as if they're suddenly 'the one,'" said a photographer intimate with the velvet-rope crowd, "for the inner sanctum."

Not only that, Mr. Holbrooke's appointment has positioned him to make the next step, as Madeleine Albright did. "There's nothing wrong with wanting to be Secretary of State, although I've never heard him say that's what he wants," said James Hoge, editor of the Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs magazine and probably Mr. Holbrooke's best friend. "Dick's a very strong-minded man with real commitments to what he thinks American foreign policy ought to be. He's a believer that when it's your time in history, you have to lead, and that it's our time. He also holds with the idea that it's individuals who shape history."

That depends on a Presidential victory for Mr. Holbrooke's ally Vice President Al Gore. And Mr. Holbrooke can help as a New Yorker and diplomatic agent. The waning years of the Clinton Administration–about which Mr. Holbrooke was insinuatingly critical in To End a War , his book on the Bosnia venture–is a good time for him to cultivate New York. "Dick's never had a real New York base before," said his friend James Goodale, the First Amendment lawyer, whose wife, Toni Goodale, recently began fund raising for Mr. Gore's political action committee, "and now he's going to be a very heavy hitter politically and socially."

Others more reluctant to forgive Mr. Holbrooke the ambition they say combats his principles and humanitarian ideals, warn that he and Ms. Marton better prepare themselves for a bumpy ascent. "You can divide New York into two crowds," said a journalist who knows them, "people who like Dick, or think they have to, and people who don't. And Kati is his doppelgänger."

If Mr. Holbrooke has often been described as brilliant but self-aggrandizing, a bombastic careerist and unctuous climber, characterizations of Ms. Marton suggest Elizabeth Taylor channeling George Sand. Indeed, practically from the day of Mr. Holbrooke's nomination, Don Imus has been feasting on them regularly on the radio.

Throughout Mr. Holbrooke's career, from diplomatic apprenticeship in Vietnam to the Carter State Department, a Peace Corps directorship in Morocco, foreign-affairs journalism, investment banking, his Clinton Administration postings and back to finance, he's been cited for Machiavelliana, intellectual arrogance, opportunistic social mingling and self-promotion. He has been, and is, called "bully," "user" and not a "team player."

Now he is a team player, and the other member of the team is Ms. Marton. "They're like two ambitions that met," said a journalist, "across a crowded room." Sympathizers prefer to call the partnership symbiotic. For every mogul he has made it his geopolitical business to befriend–Henry Kravis, for instance, is now a close pal–she can match him, tycoon for tycoon. During her two-year term, 1995-97, as chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, she was instrumental in bringing in enough corporate sponsorships to bankroll a small, oppressed country.

While Government colleagues have historically viewed his abrasiveness as antithetical to their cautiously bureaucratic ways, one longtime friend called the tall, hefty Mr. Holbrooke "a giant-size version of a garden-variety Washington narcissist."

He has said that he lives by two lessons he learned from Henry Cabot Lodge, when he served on the Ambassador's staff in Vietnam: (1) The guest list is the most important thing in life, and (2) always eat before attending an official dinner, because they'll try to kill you.

Mr. Holbrooke, who could not make himself available for comment, will be more focused on living up to his own track record: as a notoriously ruthless negotiator, which even his detractors admit has resulted from his take-no-prisoners code of conduct. He earned one of his nicknames, "The Bulldozer," for his habit of plowing through bureaucratic timidity and red tape. "He is not subtle," said the novelist Ward Just, an old Foreign Service hand. "He's a tough customer."

In the past this was a liability. One White House source reported that President Clinton described Mr. Holbrooke as a combination of Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman, with too much Rodman in the mix. But now, especially in the wake of his perceived successes in Bosnia, the bluster is being enlisted to deal with the controversy swirling around the $2.1 billion in U.N. membership dues currently in arrears from the United States. "He knows what he wants and how to pursue it, relentlessly, one might say–his tenacity wears people down," said Fareed Zakaria, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs .

Frank Wisner, the recently retired Ambassador to India now employed as vice chairman for external affairs at the American International Group, has been a Holbrooke watcher since they met as Foreign Service fledglings in Saigon.

"I know all the criticisms of Dick," he said, "that he's prepared to trample roughshod over feelings and to upstage everyone, and I'm not saying that they're not in measure true. He angers a lot of people. But the pluses outweigh the minuses. He's a man of huge intelligence, force of character and logic, with a deep, sustained concern for the nation's foreign affairs."

On a personal level, this has tended to translate, as many of Mr. Holbrooke's other friends are delicately wont to do, into viewing him as a lovable creep. What can you say about a guy who used to ditch dates at the end of the evening for the opportunity to escort Jacqueline Onassis home? "He's intellectually honest, but so blunt it can be disconcerting," said Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson, who has socialized with him and Ms. Marton.

David Halberstam, another friend from East Asian days, said that Mr. Holbrooke "has a political radar and foreign-policy knowledge that is off the charts but hasn't been as acute at reading the forces lying in wait for himself." Mr. Holbrooke has conceded in To End a War that his foot-shooting obtuseness went a long way toward defeating his earlier chances of making Secretary of State. But Bosnia was a watershed in a post-Cold War world. "Dick has a genuine sense of America's power," Mr. Halberstam said, "and, because of Vietnam–the tempering by defeat and disillusionment–of its limitations. The great thing about all that ambition of his now is that it's finally harnessed to something larger than he is, to a greater good."

Kati Marton, many feel, has been in large part responsible for what one friend refers to as "the reinvention of Dick Holbrooke." As with many of the women he was involved with in the past–Diane Sawyer, socialite decorator Mimi Russell, Condé Nast editor Sarah Giles–Ms. Marton initially appealed to Mr. Holbrooke, friends said, for the recognition and clout he discerned in the journalism world from her work and marriage to Mr. Jennings, and for her visible personal charms. In an acknowledged self-portrait in her 1987 semi-autobiographical novel, An American Woman , she wrote: "Ugly was not a word anyone had ever used to describe Anna…. At thirty-six she had just reached her prime, and she knew it. Her body was leaner, more mobile, and certainly more self-aware than in her twenties.… Anna frankly liked her looks and regretted not being able to see her own image."

In addition, Ms. Marton's social skills, friends said, have helped rein in some of Mr. Holbrooke's behavior, which led, among other tensions, to friction between him and Secretary of State Albright. Last year, Ms. Marton wrote a moving National Affairs column in Newsweek , in which she drew on a discovery that her Catholic parents, who emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1957, were converts from Judaism and then wrote about similar revelations concerning Ms. Albright. In it, she referred to the Secretary as "my friend Madeleine."

The "humanizing" of Richard Holbrooke, as one friend put it, stems equally from Ms. Marton's longstanding commitment to human rights, her passionate involvement with international press freedom, and an engagement with ideas that matches his own.

Flowing directly from her background as the daughter of crusading journalists who spent two years in Budapest's Fo Street Maximum Security Prison during the 1950's, they have also informed her writing: Her three other books are Wallenberg , The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Coverup in the Case of CBS Correspondent George Polk , and A Death in Jerusalem: The Assassination by Jewish Extremists of the First Middle East Peacemaker . Her tenure as chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists was marked by her bar-elevating fund raising and publicity accomplishments, including the high percentage of A-list names she netted for its annual benefit, but also by her activism.

Yet her blurring of distinctions among the public, personal and political occasionally caused her to overstep the bounds of journalistic impartiality: After her introduction praising Mr. Holbrooke as one of the greatest public servants on earth in front of a black-tie committee gathering in 1997, several members considered drafting a letter of censure. Much of her writing, too, is of the enough-about-me, let's-talk-about-me school–her highly personal introduction to the Committee to Protect Journalists' annual report in 1996, for instance, stands in marked contrast to the next year's survey, from current president Gene Roberts.

Nor has she hesitated to use her connection to Mr. Holbrooke to further her agenda, as when she met with Bosnian Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to discuss press restrictions in his country and to urge the release of imprisoned American journalist David Rohde in 1995. To the fascination of seasoned diplomats, her technique under such circumstances, which helped secure Mr. Rohde's freedom, closely resembled Mr. Holbrooke's.

"She essentially browbeat Milosevic," said a Committee to Protect Journalists colleague. Not long after Ms. Marton's return from Turkey in July, Mr. Holbrooke was leaving a meeting with Defense Secretary William Cohen in Washington and found himself face to face with Turkey's military strongman, Gen. Cevik Bur. "I have reviewed the minutes of the meeting [Ms. Marton had at the foreign ministry]," General Bur told him, "and I agree that this man does not belong in prison."

Such energy, Ms. Marton's friends said, appears to be the consequence of her feeling that she could finally come into her own after many years in Mr. Jennings' shadow during their marriage, an increasingly unhappy relationship that engendered a flood of attention when Ms. Marton embarked on a drearily public affair with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen–often chortled about on the air by Don Imus. "She has … grown in her sense of confidence about her ability to take the values she believes in and really do something with them," said Linda Healy, the editor of her books. "And she's done it in an arena more generally dominated by men."

A man less dedicated than Mr. Holbrooke to the social side of power-brokering might feel nervous to hear Ms. Marton say, "I really want to help him without giving up my day job." Instead, the inveterate striver in Mr. Holbrooke seems primed and ready to plunge into the United Nations' social scene. Those who know him say he thrives on gossip and the larger issues it disguises. Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter recalled a taxi ride he took with Mr. Holbrooke following an International Rescue Committee gala in New York at which Mr. Holbrooke arrived to a standing ovation shortly after finalizing the Dayton peace agreement. "I rode with him over to Nightline ," Mr. Alter said, "and instead of answering my questions about how he felt about this 'historic moment,' he wanted to talk about Newsweek having run a story on Frank Richardson and Kimba Wood … he had still managed to keep abreast what was going on in New York-Washington power, media and gossip circles."

Mr. Holbrooke will have to work harder to win Wall Street's general approval and to reawaken and expand its support for Al Gore. Fancier ambassadorial digs sparkling with celebrity, and diplomat-studded dinners, won't hurt. Despite his long run at Shearson Lehman in the 1980's and his experience at First Boston, Mr. Holbrooke is not exactly considered a financial district heavyweight, and, in the private sector his outsider status persists. "Dick's job has been to make it rain," said Steve Rattner, managing partner of Lazard Frères & Company, who first met Mr. Holbrooke when they were both Washington journalists. "As a rainmaker, he's been able to make great use of the seniority he had in the public sector."

His media-centrism goes deeper. Mr. Holbrooke's diplomatic career was launched when the former editor of the college paper Brown Daily News was turned down for an entry-level job at The New York Times . He took the Foreign Service exam in a fit of pique and succeeded. Many of his friendships date back to those he made when he would hang out with the press corps in Vietnam, and he has added to his media connections since, but he has found it difficult to distinguish between professional and personal criticism. Thin-skinned or not, said James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs and author of a new biography of Dean Acheson, "Dick will be entertaining at the U.N., and the media will be entertained." This goes a long way toward clarifying the lukewarm response to Mr. Holbrooke's nomination from Madeleine Albright, who has never hidden her irritation with the way his grasping for attention can impinge on her own spotlight.

For that matter, Mr. Holbrooke and Ms. Marton are probably well quit of any direct Washington involvement except in the political stratosphere to which he long aspired and has now attained. They belong to New York not the least because of Mr. Holbrooke's vaunted insufferability–what resentful erstwhile State Department associates have traditionally referred to as his coziness with the media, have obliquely described as his pushy behavior, and have ever so subtly criticized as his woeful lack of cool and genteel restraint.

Translation, anyone?

For years, the counterpart to this rap on Mr. Holbrooke has been that he closeted his Jewish background for the sake of appearing as WASP-y. The son of Dan and Trudi Holbrooke, raised in Scarsdale, N.Y., schooled at Brown University, he was a son of assimilated, upper-class Jews who fled Nazi racism. "I've been with him plenty of times when his Jewishness was obvious," said his friend Stanley Karnow, the journalist and author, "and he jokes about it plenty, too. It just isn't an issue with him, or Kati."

His friend the journalist Frances FitzGerald almost hit the thickly carpeted floor of the Knickerbocker Club on June 26, when, she said, Mr. Holbrooke gave a funny, self-effacing, nostalgic toast at Ambassador Frank Wisner's 60th-birthday party. It ended with the words "I love you"–at a gathering, no less, where many had feared that Mr. Holbrooke would manage to use the fresh news of his nomination to outshine the guest of honor. Others reported watching the televised White House ceremony at which the President had announced Mr. Holbrooke's nomination with mounting astonishment as "the Bulldozer" reminisced about his father and his family history. Then he started to cry.

As for Ms. Marton, she has presciently written about imperfect but bold men dedicated to international politics and actually saving human lives, and she has ended up married to one. Taking life's cues from history is a not unhelpful ingredient in the couple's undeniable drive.

Four years ago, a year before her marriage, she wrote of the United Nations, "in the 1990's the world body falters under the weight of a similar burden as its peacemakers and peacekeepers thread their way among ancient tribal enmities from the Middle East to Bosnia." The new book she is working on may be as self-investigatory: It's on the changing historical role of America's First Ladies.

It's called research.