Ms. Smiley’s reading list was never meant be the definitive top 100. She skips Hemingway altogether and chooses Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying over Absalom, Absalom! She bitch-slaps Nabokov as “a tireless self-promoter.” She calls Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier a “masterpiece, almost a perfect novel.” She includes Garrison Keillor. Yup, it’s a personal thing. And to judge from the author photo, she enjoyed herself: She’s beaming as though beaming were a broad-jump event, with just a touch of careworn to remind you of her serious-lit cred. (Hey—she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner!)

But who’s she writing for besides herself? Knopf considers it a triple threat—“an anatomy of the art of fiction, a guide for readers and writers, and a memoir of literary life”—but the sum is less successful than the individual parts. A few of the survey-course early chapters are rambling and repetitive, neither as pungent nor as scissor-sharp as they might have been in the hands of, say, Camille Paglia. The astronautic overview reminded me of those satellite-picture books that seem to be on coffee tables these days—Africa from 20 miles up. Suffice it to say that if you have a pretty good handle on such questions as “What is a novel?” or “Who is a novelist?”—or if you’re not in the mood for a lecture—go ahead and skim the first half to get to the best part, her exegesis of those 100 novels, which turns out to be original, fearless, fascinating.

And hoo-boy eccentric. After supplying her bona fides as a bibliophile (she relishes the “languor” of reading, “the quiet sounds of one’s hands against the paper”), she unburdens herself of prejudices that would make a Maoist grad student blanch. Not even her well-deserved reputation for idiosyncratic taste (remember the 1996 Harper’s article in which she declared that Huckleberry Finn was boring?) prepares us for the full extent of her heresy. To wit: She prefers Daniel Defoe (“I liked everything about him”) to Henry James (“prissy, domineering”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“silly and shallow”) and Thackeray (“sour”). She considers Uncle Tom’s Cabin “essential reading” (“no one interested in American history, or in the history of the novel … should miss [it]”), yet dismisses Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as “a bad work of art” (that beats Chinua Achebe, who complained 30 years ago of its casual racism).

Even more scandalously, she confesses that Moby-Dick “didn’t make much of an impression on me,” finds The House of Seven Gables “mysterious but not entertaining” and calls Ulysses “forbidding” (“the stylistic fireworks come to seem like an elaborate surface distraction from what is missing at the core of the plot”). But the cherry on top is her takedown of The Great Gatsby. Not only does it shortchange us by 100 pages, in her opinion, but its tone is bittersweet “before the action has earned the right to be bittersweet”—which, I suppose, is another way of saying it’s sentimental. (But isn’t Fitzgerald supposed to be sentimental? And Joyce forbidding?)

Wait—there’s more: The emperor has no clothes. Or, in this case, one of the cherished last lines in American literature—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—makes no sense. “The image is lyrical and paradoxical but it doesn’t really make sense,” she argues. It’s true—seeing it naked like that, ripped from its context, the final drumbeat of Gatsby does seem sort of shipwrecked. Could the novel really be overrated? Ms. Smiley doesn’t think “it is careful enough, wise enough, or well enough thought through to be a masterpiece.”

Her own prose (witness that last sentence) is a little more flat-footed than we might wish, more like teacher’s notes than deathless whatever. Yet this doesn’t keep her from tossing out any number of challenging lines (“ Frankenstein was the first ‘high concept’ idea of the modern era”); raising rigorous philosophical questions (“Do we expect the novel to reconfirm our beliefs about the world or to challenge them?”); or stuffing the work with tasty literary gossip (Al Gore’s favorite book is Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, while George W.’s is The Very Hungry Caterpillar). She even has the grace to reveal second thoughts about her own oeuvre, confiding that she doesn’t find her much-beloved novel A Thousand Acres “very relate-to-able.” Added bonus: She’s good at winking literary cross-reference. Who needs 13 blackbirds when Jane Smiley’s on the case?

Any writer so comfortable out on a limb (Sinclair Lewis, she predicts, is ripe for a revival, despite his calling himself a “scold” for being satiric without being funny) should be commended for the courage of her convictions. Nor is she without wit: Moby-Dick “is an excellent example of how a novelist can excel at what he perhaps should not have tried in the first place.” She’s capable of noble reflections (“the joy of meeting up with the author’s mind is so intense that it hardly seems possible that it must be private”) and even manages to give a name to one of life’s enduring mysteries, the “French paradox”: “How can a world as beautiful and delightful as France produce a literature universally peopled by vipers and fools?” She’s incisive about D.H. Lawrence (“brutal” as well as subversive); Nicholson Baker (he’s not only tricky but “austere,” too); and the peerless Francine Prose, whose satire tends toward the “dry and ambivalent” rather than the “angry and overt.” She’s by turns wise (“Nothing is so seductive in a narrator as self-knowledge”), illuminating (especially in comparing apples and oranges, like Faulkner and Kafka), and merciless in deflating bloated reputations (about Oscar Wilde she writes, “epigram piled upon epigram seems more like a … form of neurosis than art”). She consistently offers much to mull (is Anna Karenina individuated enough? Is John Gardner’s Grendel profound or merely smart? Can John Updike not only be John Updike but Philip Roth, too, “in his spare time”?) If she’s occasionally overimpressed (or is it tactically generous?), she mostly manages to strike a provocative balance, pronouncing Anne Tyler “clear-eyed but benign”—a phrase that could be justly applied to Jane Smiley, too.

So what’s the upshot? What’s she bringing back from her exhaustively personal pilgrimage through the smoky thickets of literature? “It’s worth knowing that serious thoughts are being thought, and also that serious fun is being made of fools everywhere. It’s also worth knowing, in dangerous times, that dangers have come and gone and we still have these books.”

Four years on, and counting ….

Daniel Asa Rose, author of Hiding Places : A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family’s Escape from the Holocaust (Three Rivers), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Ms. Smiley’s reading list was never meant be the definitive top 100. She skips Hemingway altogether and chooses Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying over Absalom, Absalom! She bitch-slaps Nabokov as “a tireless self-promoter.” She calls Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier a “masterpiece, almost a perfect novel.” She includes Garrison Keillor. Yup, it’s a personal thing. And to judge from the author photo, she enjoyed herself: She’s beaming as though beaming were a broad-jump event, with just a touch of careworn to remind you of her serious-lit cred. (Hey—she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner!)

But who’s she writing for besides herself? Knopf considers it a triple threat—“an anatomy of the art of fiction, a guide for readers and writers, and a memoir of literary life”—but the sum is less successful than the individual parts. A few of the survey-course early chapters are rambling and repetitive, neither as pungent nor as scissor-sharp as they might have been in the hands of, say, Camille Paglia. The astronautic overview reminded me of those satellite-picture books that seem to be on coffee tables these days—Africa from 20 miles up. Suffice it to say that if you have a pretty good handle on such questions as “What is a novel?” or “Who is a novelist?”—or if you’re not in the mood for a lecture—go ahead and skim the first half to get to the best part, her exegesis of those 100 novels, which turns out to be original, fearless, fascinating.

And hoo-boy eccentric. After supplying her bona fides as a bibliophile (she relishes the “languor” of reading, “the quiet sounds of one’s hands against the paper”), she unburdens herself of prejudices that would make a Maoist grad student blanch. Not even her well-deserved reputation for idiosyncratic taste (remember the 1996 Harper’s article in which she declared that Huckleberry Finn was boring?) prepares us for the full extent of her heresy. To wit: She prefers Daniel Defoe (“I liked everything about him”) to Henry James (“prissy, domineering”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“silly and shallow”) and Thackeray (“sour”). She considers Uncle Tom’s Cabin “essential reading” (“no one interested in American history, or in the history of the novel … should miss [it]”), yet dismisses Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as “a bad work of art” (that beats Chinua Achebe, who complained 30 years ago of its casual racism).

Even more scandalously, she confesses that Moby-Dick “didn’t make much of an impression on me,” finds The House of Seven Gables “mysterious but not entertaining” and calls Ulysses “forbidding” (“the stylistic fireworks come to seem like an elaborate surface distraction from what is missing at the core of the plot”). But the cherry on top is her takedown of The Great Gatsby. Not only does it shortchange us by 100 pages, in her opinion, but its tone is bittersweet “before the action has earned the right to be bittersweet”—which, I suppose, is another way of saying it’s sentimental. (But isn’t Fitzgerald supposed to be sentimental? And Joyce forbidding?)

Wait—there’s more: The emperor has no clothes. Or, in this case, one of the cherished last lines in American literature—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—makes no sense. “The image is lyrical and paradoxical but it doesn’t really make sense,” she argues. It’s true—seeing it naked like that, ripped from its context, the final drumbeat of Gatsby does seem sort of shipwrecked. Could the novel really be overrated? Ms. Smiley doesn’t think “it is careful enough, wise enough, or well enough thought through to be a masterpiece.”

Her own prose (witness that last sentence) is a little more flat-footed than we might wish, more like teacher’s notes than deathless whatever. Yet this doesn’t keep her from tossing out any number of challenging lines (“Frankenstein was the first ‘high concept’ idea of the modern era”); raising rigorous philosophical questions (“Do we expect the novel to reconfirm our beliefs about the world or to challenge them?”); or stuffing the work with tasty literary gossip (Al Gore’s favorite book is Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, while George W.’s is The Very Hungry Caterpillar). She even has the grace to reveal second thoughts about her own oeuvre, confiding that she doesn’t find her much-beloved novel A Thousand Acres “very relate-to-able.” Added bonus: She’s good at winking literary cross-reference. Who needs 13 blackbirds when Jane Smiley’s on the case?

Any writer so comfortable out on a limb (Sinclair Lewis, she predicts, is ripe for a revival, despite his calling himself a “scold” for being satiric without being funny) should be commended for the courage of her convictions. Nor is she without wit: Moby-Dick “is an excellent example of how a novelist can excel at what he perhaps should not have tried in the first place.” She’s capable of noble reflections (“the joy of meeting up with the author’s mind is so intense that it hardly seems possible that it must be private”) and even manages to give a name to one of life’s enduring mysteries, the “French paradox”: “How can a world as beautiful and delightful as France produce a literature universally peopled by vipers and fools?” She’s incisive about D.H. Lawrence (“brutal” as well as subversive); Nicholson Baker (he’s not only tricky but “austere,” too); and the peerless Francine Prose, whose satire tends toward the “dry and ambivalent” rather than the “angry and overt.” She’s by turns wise (“Nothing is so seductive in a narrator as self-knowledge”), illuminating (especially in comparing apples and oranges, like Faulkner and Kafka), and merciless in deflating bloated reputations (about Oscar Wilde she writes, “epigram piled upon epigram seems more like a … form of neurosis than art”). She consistently offers much to mull (is Anna Karenina individuated enough? Is John Gardner’s Grendel profound or merely smart? Can John Updike not only be John Updike but Philip Roth, too, “in his spare time”?) If she’s occasionally overimpressed (or is it tactically generous?), she mostly manages to strike a provocative balance, pronouncing Anne Tyler “clear-eyed but benign”—a phrase that could be justly applied to Jane Smiley, too.

So what’s the upshot? What’s she bringing back from her exhaustively personal pilgrimage through the smoky thickets of literature? “It’s worth knowing that serious thoughts are being thought, and also that serious fun is being made of fools everywhere. It’s also worth knowing, in dangerous times, that dangers have come and gone and we still have these books.”

Four years on, and counting ….

Daniel Asa Rose, author of Hiding Places : A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family’s Escape from the Holocaust (Three Rivers), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

“Can
it be true that all of Will's patients are consumed by the topic of sex?
Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it but
not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only
under certain highly specific circumstances …. ”

Well,
whether or not Will's patients are consumed by sex, Kathryn Harrison's research
into the subject continues unabated. Eight years after she set off shock
wavelets with her autobiographical description of father-daughter incest in The Kiss, Ms. Harrison resumes the
succulent munching of forbidden fruit in her new novel, Envy. Quadruple betrayal sounds like a surgical procedure; in fact,
it's the stuff of a rich and complex summer read.

It
begins, innocently enough, when mild-mannered psychotherapist Will (“I
over-analyze when I'm threatened”) Moreland trots off to his college reunion
(Cornell, Class of '79), where he badgers an old flame about whether he might
be the father of her daughter. Back in the office, he feels himself more than
ever subject to “lust attacks” that are as random as they are virulent. This
being a Kathryn Harrison novel—where sex is never just sex—we're invited to
explore the deeper thing it stands for. Is it “a manifestation of his guilt
over [his son] Luke's drowning and his desire to be punished, revealed as a
danger, humiliated by his peers”? Or “an escape route from his
hyper-intellectualizing everything”? Or an assault on his rather opaque wife's
unavailability?

Enter
a new patient whose man-eating sexuality puts all to the test. That the
youthful seducer is not well manicured but a nail-biter with “gnawed strawberry
hulls” only adds to her allure: In conjunction with her stained coat and
unkempt hair, it gives her sexuality an unexpectedly squalid, self-devouring
edge, especially when Will gets close enough to see that her nails are “bitten
to the point of injury” so that her fingertips seem less chewed than “burned by
corrupt explorations.”

Who
could compete with this? Certainly not the women at the health club, who are
“clothed by [their] musculature” so that they're “not naked. Not really. Their
clothes are off, but they've created a kind of uniform out of their bodies.
They're so aggressively trained and toned that they've conformed to an
established, standard shape.” Young Jennifer's heat is way hotter.

Before
you can say “counter-transference,” patient has therapist on his back in the
steamiest female-on-male rape scene since …. Well, put it this way: After
reading it, I felt guilty and chastened both, as though I'd not only cheated on
my wife but gotten my comeuppance, too. Mind what beach you read this on.

But
Ms. Harrison has only begun to toy with us. To avoid giving anything away,
let's just say she maneuvers us into the same boat she was steering when she
wrote The Kiss. Because we get no
warning, we feel as implicated as Will does, and in a similar state of shock:
“What he's done—what he may have done—reduces adultery, only this morning a
significant sin, almost to a marital misdemeanor.”

Envy is rife with the manipulations of a
fiendish plot-weaver. It's not so easy for the reader to cluck disapproval
after Ms. Harrison has seduced us along with her protagonist, condemning us to
“a sickening emotional arc”—“from horror to anger to shame and then back.” Not
many writers have the guts or the gift to take us on this Tilt-a-Whirl of
illicit sexual emotions, making the unspeakable not only speakable but entirely
plausible.

Will
has an estranged twin brother, a half-sympathetic, half-diabolical character
who has taken refuge from a facial stain (a “livid splash of purple” that gives
him the yin-yang appearance of a superhero) by developing himself into an
Olympic swimmer. Stung by a lifetime's injustice of facing “an ideal version of
himself” across the playground and dining-room table, it turns out that this
“spectral celebrity” has taken liberties, shall we say, with the women in
Will's past, including Will's wife—the night before the wedding. Was it “an act
of hatred? Of desperation? Would it even be possible to parse out one from the
other?”

And
then it gets better. I mean, worse. Faced with his newfound knowledge, Will
can't think straight: “Thoughts don't proceed in logical argument; they
ricochet around inside his skull, cracking into one another like pinballs and
destroying every coherent mental construction in their path.” (It's billiard
balls, not pinballs, that crack into one another; Will is so addled that his
author can't distinguish pinball from pool.) Ms. Harrison has hit upon
something more biblically abhorrent even than incest: She's discovered
brotherly betrayal, an archetypal transgression intimately associated with the
word blazoned on the cover of this novel. “Envy” touches the nerve that drives
Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Will and his cold-blooded fish of a brother.
They're all at swim in an Olympic-sized pool of sin, and such is the tidal
force of this novel that we're right in there, dog-paddling with them.

This
is a fast read, but beneath the surface excitement, the core issues of trust
and betrayal stand up well to close scrutiny. The characters rehash events, not
in a Rashomon-like way so that new
information is added with each retelling, but merely to chew the information
over and over and thereby normalize it. This too is part of the author's gifted
deviousness. Her language throughout is sensually cerebral: coffeemakers that
brew “with a congested noise,” love that is like water in “assuming the shape
of the vessel, always imperfect, that holds it.” Her use of exclamation marks
instead of question marks—“Revenge! For what! Revenge for what!”—makes for a
maddened kind of utterance that nails the state of mind wherein a character
knows but can't accept the answer. She captures the cadences of domestic
turbulence better than Edward Albee ever did, not only the physical descriptors
(one character seeks the most terrible truths “with her face in her hands, the
way someone might cradle an aching jaw”) but also in the breathless manner her
characters cut each other off—overlap—interrupt—circle back. The dash never has
it so good as when Kathryn Harrison sits down to type.

It
goes without saying, of course, that she has boundary issues. None of her
characters have ever heard of the concept of T.M.I. (too much information). Do
real-life fathers talk about whom they're “boffing” with their offspring, or
ask them if an extramarital kiss entailed tongue? Borderline inappropriateness
is a given in a book by Ms. Harrison, and it's alarming how quickly we get used
to it. We're not jarred when Will tells his dad that he gets a “physical
response” to his female patients or acknowledges that during a hug, he's
“keenly conscious of his father's body and the comfort it offered him.” We
scarcely blink when, in return, father tells son that his latest affair has
inspired him to “upgrade [his] underwear” and confesses that he can't always
“muster [himself] for the job at hand.”

The
question is: Do we accept all this because, after 10 psyche-shattering books,
Ms. Harrison has debauched us by now? Or is it because we recognize that she's
communicating something important? Here's what she's telling us, in book after
book, and it's why we forgive and even celebrate her, lurid trappings and all:
Our strengths are always our undoing, and to be quintessentially human is to be
“intelligent, but not enough to understand; awake, but not enough to be
entirely conscious. Filled with love, but not enough to overcome fear. Made in
the image of God, perhaps, but, if so, like a fifth-generation photocopy, or
the fax of a fax of a fax, so that even the outline is approximate.”

Daniel Asa Rose reviews
books regularly for The
Observer.

Well, whether or not Will's patients are consumed by sex, Kathryn Harrison's research into the subject continues unabated. Eight years after she set off shock wavelets with her autobiographical description of father-daughter incest in The Kiss, Ms. Harrison resumes the succulent munching of forbidden fruit in her new novel, Envy. Quadruple betrayal sounds like a surgical procedure; in fact, it's the stuff of a rich and complex summer read.

It begins, innocently enough, when mild-mannered psychotherapist Will ("I over-analyze when I'm threatened") Moreland trots off to his college reunion (Cornell, Class of '79), where he badgers an old flame about whether he might be the father of her daughter. Back in the office, he feels himself more than ever subject to "lust attacks" that are as random as they are virulent. This being a Kathryn Harrison novel-where sex is never just sex-we're invited to explore the deeper thing it stands for. Is it "a manifestation of his guilt over [his son] Luke's drowning and his desire to be punished, revealed as a danger, humiliated by his peers"? Or "an escape route from his hyper-intellectualizing everything"? Or an assault on his rather opaque wife's unavailability?

Enter a new patient whose man-eating sexuality puts all to the test. That the youthful seducer is not well manicured but a nail-biter with "gnawed strawberry hulls" only adds to her allure: In conjunction with her stained coat and unkempt hair, it gives her sexuality an unexpectedly squalid, self-devouring edge, especially when Will gets close enough to see that her nails are "bitten to the point of injury" so that her fingertips seem less chewed than "burned by corrupt explorations."

Who could compete with this? Certainly not the women at the health club, who are "clothed by [their] musculature" so that they're "not naked. Not really. Their clothes are off, but they've created a kind of uniform out of their bodies. They're so aggressively trained and toned that they've conformed to an established, standard shape." Young Jennifer's heat is way hotter.

Before you can say "counter-transference," patient has therapist on his back in the steamiest female-on-male rape scene since …. Well, put it this way: After reading it, I felt guilty and chastened both, as though I'd not only cheated on my wife but gotten my comeuppance, too. Mind what beach you read this on.

But Ms. Harrison has only begun to toy with us. To avoid giving anything away, let's just say she maneuvers us into the same boat she was steering when she wrote The Kiss. Because we get no warning, we feel as implicated as Will does, and in a similar state of shock: "What he's done-what he may have done-reduces adultery, only this morning a significant sin, almost to a marital misdemeanor."

Envy is rife with the manipulations of a fiendish plot-weaver. It's not so easy for the reader to cluck disapproval after Ms. Harrison has seduced us along with her protagonist, condemning us to "a sickening emotional arc"-"from horror to anger to shame and then back." Not many writers have the guts or the gift to take us on this Tilt-a-Whirl of illicit sexual emotions, making the unspeakable not only speakable but entirely plausible.

Will has an estranged twin brother, a half-sympathetic, half-diabolical character who has taken refuge from a facial stain (a "livid splash of purple" that gives him the yin-yang appearance of a superhero) by developing himself into an Olympic swimmer. Stung by a lifetime's injustice of facing "an ideal version of himself" across the playground and dining-room table, it turns out that this "spectral celebrity" has taken liberties, shall we say, with the women in Will's past, including Will's wife-the night before the wedding. Was it "an act of hatred? Of desperation? Would it even be possible to parse out one from the other?"

And then it gets better. I mean, worse. Faced with his newfound knowledge, Will can't think straight: "Thoughts don't proceed in logical argument; they ricochet around inside his skull, cracking into one another like pinballs and destroying every coherent mental construction in their path." (It's billiard balls, not pinballs, that crack into one another; Will is so addled that his author can't distinguish pinball from pool.) Ms. Harrison has hit upon something more biblically abhorrent even than incest: She's discovered brotherly betrayal, an archetypal transgression intimately associated with the word blazoned on the cover of this novel. "Envy" touches the nerve that drives Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Will and his cold-blooded fish of a brother. They're all at swim in an Olympic-sized pool of sin, and such is the tidal force of this novel that we're right in there, dog-paddling with them.

This is a fast read, but beneath the surface excitement, the core issues of trust and betrayal stand up well to close scrutiny. The characters rehash events, not in a Rashomon-like way so that new information is added with each retelling, but merely to chew the information over and over and thereby normalize it. This too is part of the author's gifted deviousness. Her language throughout is sensually cerebral: coffeemakers that brew "with a congested noise," love that is like water in "assuming the shape of the vessel, always imperfect, that holds it." Her use of exclamation marks instead of question marks-"Revenge! For what! Revenge for what!"-makes for a maddened kind of utterance that nails the state of mind wherein a character knows but can't accept the answer. She captures the cadences of domestic turbulence better than Edward Albee ever did, not only the physical descriptors (one character seeks the most terrible truths "with her face in her hands, the way someone might cradle an aching jaw") but also in the breathless manner her characters cut each other off-overlap-interrupt-circle back. The dash never has it so good as when Kathryn Harrison sits down to type.

It goes without saying, of course, that she has boundary issues. None of her characters have ever heard of the concept of T.M.I. (too much information). Do real-life fathers talk about whom they're "boffing" with their offspring, or ask them if an extramarital kiss entailed tongue? Borderline inappropriateness is a given in a book by Ms. Harrison, and it's alarming how quickly we get used to it. We're not jarred when Will tells his dad that he gets a "physical response" to his female patients or acknowledges that during a hug, he's "keenly conscious of his father's body and the comfort it offered him." We scarcely blink when, in return, father tells son that his latest affair has inspired him to "upgrade [his] underwear" and confesses that he can't always "muster [himself] for the job at hand."

The question is: Do we accept all this because, after 10 psyche-shattering books, Ms. Harrison has debauched us by now? Or is it because we recognize that she's communicating something important? Here's what she's telling us, in book after book, and it's why we forgive and even celebrate her, lurid trappings and all: Our strengths are always our undoing, and to be quintessentially human is to be "intelligent, but not enough to understand; awake, but not enough to be entirely conscious. Filled with love, but not enough to overcome fear. Made in the image of God, perhaps, but, if so, like a fifth-generation photocopy, or the fax of a fax of a fax, so that even the outline is approximate."

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

There was a little girl,

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she

was horrid.

I present this Longfellow verselet by way of asserting that Nicole Krauss can be very good indeed, and occasionally horrid-the horridness stemming from the forgivable sin of overweening literary ambition. Hence the overweening title of her latest, The History of Love. (Gee, nothing more?)

You'd think, from the way some reviewers have jumped on Ms. Kraus and her superstar bridegroom, Jonathan Safran Foer, who came out with his second novel just before she came out with hers, that the duo had murdered Mother Goose in her sleep. (Granted, the press may well have a permanent case of poet envy, and piling on is the closest some critics get to physical exercise.)

To set the record straight-or at least exfoliate the discussion somewhat-let us stipulate that Mr. Foer is not Ms. Krauss' only influence. She had a well-received literary career underway with her first novel, Man Walks into a Room (2002), before marrying Mr. Foer. To offset the charge that she's too much in the orbit of her husband (a charge, it must be said, the twosome did little to discourage by cross-echoing each other in their new books), I offer traces of the following influences (take a deep breath):

Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Bob Dylan, Ingmar Bergman, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez ("She roamed the house in a kimono printed with red flowers, and wherever she went a trail of crumbled pages followed"); children's books like Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline, Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree and Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day ("It was turning out to be a bad day" is a paragraph in itself); the oh-so-hummable cadences of Fiddler on the Roof ("it dawned on him that, miracle of miracles, this lovely girl might actually be developing feelings for him"); sundry nursery rhymes ("one shoe on, one off"); and the romantic film comedies of the early 90's (especially Sleepless in Seattle and Milk Money, which featured cloyingly precocious children micromanaging their parents' love lives-a popular trope in American movies when Ms. Krauss was in her apparently impressionable late teens).

So it ain't just her hubby.

(As for the hubby himself, whose new novel has been so vilified that he recently said he feels like "the most hated writer in America," I believe that the eminence responsible for inspiring his most successful character-the Ukrainian translator Alex in Everything Is Illuminated-is none other than Ali G's Kazakhstan import, Borat. "Che' it out," as Mr. G might say: The dates are right.)

In truth, given the rich and varied flavors of her forebears, I find it nearly impossible to be anything but divided on the subject of Ms. Krauss. On the one hand, I'm stunned by the sweep of her lyricism … but I'm bugged by the twee. I'm moved by her romantic vision, by turns muted and glowing (Winona Ryder, call your agent) … but I don't believe for a moment that the universe she's conjuring is our own. I'm slain by the mini-fables she strings prettily together … but irked by the moments of fake and clotted humility ("I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is"). Humility is not this writer's game.

It's frankly painful to see her talent marred by pretense. Her use of subtitles, for instance, is raw gimmickry: "THE DEAD SEA IS THE LOWEST PLACE ON EARTH"-a sub-chapter in its entirety-and "HOW TO RESTORE A HEARTBEAT" strike me as not so much sophomoric as a confused attempt to impress grown-ups. Is a line like "Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering" kind of wonderful, or kind of yucky? (Maybe it depends on whether you thought Elvira Madigan-the makeout film that was popular when I was an impressionable teen-was highbrow or hogwash.) Can it be that she's both precocious and pretentious at the same time, poetical and posturing? And what about her annoying habit of putting periods after short declaratives like "but" or "and yet?" It's hard not to think of this as anything but. Attention-seeking.

Then there's her thing for sadness. Let me count the ways: "The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad." "Deep down we can never forget the sadness of our insurmountable differences." "Sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love." "Sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body." "The sadness of gravity." "There are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone."

This sort of exalted gloom can only be called Weltzschmerz, a condition that for good reason usually afflicts only the very young (say, the age that enjoys Milk Money). It's what's both good and less good about Ms. Krauss-good when it feels bona fide, less so when it feels forced, especially in conjunction with such contrivances as this: "my Alma should grow up to be blessed with health and happiness and what would be so terrible some nice breasts."

Nicole Krauss may be one of those writers, like her husband, whose stock goes up and down depending not so much on the written text as on the reader's mood-seeming false one minute, poignant the next, depending on where you hang in your digestion cycle. Which makes her a very personal writer. There's not a lot of humor here (she puts a high price tag on herself, which is absolutely her right), and the whole is touched with a solemnity that you'll find either moving or mannered, or a mix of the two. Maybe, as a character in The History of Love postulates, some people "just get happier and happier everyday. And some people … just get sadder and sadder"-and reading the exasperatingly talented Ms. Krauss, we get both.

What I say is this: Let's back off and give the curl room to grow out. If Ms. Krauss and her husband are guilty of anything, it's sumptuousness of ambition, enormousness of heart. They want nothing less than to record the condition of human love. Genuine heartbreak for the world cements their work. They may just produce novels of surpassing beauty … if we don't poison them first.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

A Changed Man, by Francine Prose. HarperCollins, 421 pages, $24.95.

"What did the blind man say the first time he touched a matzoh?"

(Beat.)

"Who wrote this shit?"

Ba-da-bing! It's never a bad sign when a novelist feels expansive enough to toss a couple of irreverent jokes into the mix. In the case of National Book Award finalist Francine Prose, the relaxed confidence is well deserved. She's at the top of her game, with so many books under her belt that galleys of her new novel went out to reviewers with the dedication "TK" ("to come"). After 17 titles, she's momentarily dedicated-out.

Not that the subject matter of A Changed Man is a joking matter, exactly. The premise presented on page 1 may sound like the start of a sick shaggy-dog story-skinhead neo-Nazi walks into an anti-hate group-but Ms. Prose is loaded for bear. Her target is nothing less than sentimentality, whether it's as grandiose as the sort exhibited by the sacrosanct "Holocaust industry" or as small as the "twaddle" syncopated by Simon and Garfunkel.

Hackles go on alert from the opening, when the thunderbolt-tattooed Vincent Nolan marches into the offices of World Brotherhood Watch, a humanitarian watchdog group based in New York. This is a guy, after all, who uses "Jew" as a verb, and this is a season-spring 2001-when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is being executed, his "freaked-out piglet face" playing on barroom TV's across the nation. But Nolan wants to come in from the hate and help "save guys like me from becoming guys like me." Will they accept his offer?

Of course they will: They're do-gooders! Professional hand-wringer Bonnie ("your basic single-mother-of-two foundation fund-raiser nun") even accepts the nervous assignment of taking him under her roof, if not her wing, driving him to her bedroom community to live with her and her two disaffected sons. Never mind that it's implausible; the real reason she accepts her mission is that she can tell that the wolf man is really a pup at heart, and a lovable one at that.

"Though his face is chapped and abraded by years of anger, disappointment, alcohol, and boredom, he looks like a kid," she notes. Yes, it's true that Nolan once dunked a pesky old lady in the shallow end of a swimming pool (she was as weightless as "those balsa-wood model planes he used to make as a kid"), and yes, he does believe that the Jewish media makes sure no straight white guys ever win Survivor. But otherwise his Nazi C.V. is pretty light, with references to "Ricans" and "Jap corporate greed" little more than lip service-conversational tics like a Tourette's of the alienated. His capitalist paranoia is so casual that he's capable of railing against the System's mandatory use of seat belts while buckling himself into Bonnie's minivan. Cozily ensconced in her guest room, he feels like a housefly drowning in honey, shocked by how seductive are the comforts of the middle class. He even reads Dostoyevsky like any good child of the gentry, a white-supremacist cuddlekins.

Which is both good news and bad for our reading pleasure. Good because we can't wait to crawl into bed with this book every night to find out whether Bonnie and her bizarro house guest are going to crawl in together, too. Good also because thereby are some delicious domestic ironies put in motion: As if in a sitcom version of The Producers set in a split-level suburb, the presence of a neo-Nazi at dinner actually improves the sons' table manners. Even better because it gives Ms. Prose a platform from which to skewer the "Shoah Biz," as we watch the reformed redneck perform skillfully among the Redon watercolors of charity dinners. Not since Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic" has comedy been so bittersweetly wrung from the drawing rooms of the wing-tipped well-intentioned.

Bad news, however, because Nolan as a character presents no real danger. So safe is he (he restrains himself from going through all the family memorabilia under his bed, judging home photos to be within limits, but not each and every tax return) that the various relationships throughout the novel aren't as charged as they could be; nothing much is at stake; the fictional tension is discharged before it really gets going.

Can the pitch-perfect and nuanced Ms. Prose have it both ways? Creating a housebroken Nazi-someone who relates to Bonnie's boys more than her dolt of an overachieving ex-husband ever did-disables her from giving us a glimpse of the genuine hate that animated him when he was a storm-trooper wannabe. But maybe that's her point: Nolan inhabits a gray zone in the same way as does his counterpart, the saintly figure who steers Brotherhood Watch, a "gleaming knife blade of purity and moral courage," despite being beleaguered by egotism and petty jealousies. Both are equally flawed and noble. It's not that Ms. Prose can't do fangs; she cleverly defangs the Nazi to show us his humanity.

By the time she gets around to offering us a real villain in the form of Nolan's cousin, someone who means it when he spews invective about the "Jewdicial system" and the "Holo-hoax," two-thirds of the book is gone and laughter has drained the threat. Sure he stalks the house, but Glenn Close did it better: No way is this loser going to stew the pet rabbit.

Quick, before the orchestra warbles me from the stage, three last points: For a book that targets sentimentality in all its forms, things come a little too easy-too easy how Nolan falls in love with the head of Brotherhood Watch, too easy how everyone falls in love with Nolan, like the girls falling all over Captain America in Easy Rider. (Is it also offensive that in this Jewish milieu he's the point of attraction, as though the dowagers have never before felt a bulging bicep beneath the sleeve of a tux? A real man at last?)

Also, it's worth noting that for all her lighthearted lampooning, Ms. Prose-she of the regally sad face-always manages to convince me that she has known her share of suffering. When she talks of the "spongy exhaustion that follows hours of weeping," I trust that she's been there. Jokiness aside, she knows a poignant moment when she sees it, as when the "heartbreakingly wobbly" high-school band strikes up "Pomp and Circumstance" badly-"sour notes make it soar," "rhythm mistakes make it all the more wrenching."

Finally, if in A Changed Man you occasionally find yourself hungering for less-less discourse, less internal monologuing, fewer stretches where the actors get mired down by conscience the way a video figure periodically slogs through muddy patches-console yourself with the thought that this is kind of a Jewish book, after all, not kind of a Nazi book: more talk than action. You'd want it the other way around, maybe?

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Yo, prep-school papa! You with the gray hair and rueful smile, dropping your little bundle of neuroses off at her boarding school after the long Christmas break. You think no one was watching? You think no one saw how you jumped on the cell to your mistress before you were even down the cobblestone drive? Think again. Could be that a gimlet-eyed novelist posing as a 14-year-old student was checking out your every move.

Not that parents are the only ones who land under the feverishly microscopic lens of Curtis Sittenfeld, now all grown up, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of a big-buzz debut novel, Prep. Also in her sights is a newbie teacher who comes in for a compassionate drubbing because she has the misfortune to sport a frumpy accessory. An overweight classmate falls into empathetic disfavor not because of the extra poundage, but because she feels more secure than she has a right to. The smirkiness of another classmate is kindly judged to be only skin-deep: Her smugness was "like the earth's crust; once you got below it, she was strangely innocent."

Clearly, the narrator of Prep is incapable of missing a trick. Fresh from Nowhere Indiana, trying desperately to blend into the woodwork of her exclusive Massachusetts boarding school, Lee Fiora is the last person you'd expect to be able to see through appearances. (In real life, the author hails from Cincinnati-which makes sense. Ever notice how Ohio girls are the ones most enamored of the East Coast? Victims of the so-near-yet-so-far syndrome.) Unwealthy, awkward, obsessively attuned, Lee is inexperienced with taxis, can't pronounce "Greenwich," doesn't know Bob Dylan from Bob Marley; she's a Hoosier hick whose dad wears mismatched khakis (and is the more pitifully lovable for it). But it's precisely because she's a fish out of water that she's so keenly perceptive. As another writer from the provinces, John Updike, once said of his early stint writing "Talk of the Town" pieces for The New Yorker, who else but someone from the sticks would come up with the freshest, most urbane vignettes?

So it's a coming-of-age story as we watch Lee come to terms-or, more accurately, as she watches herself, with at least as much of the unsparing honesty she trains on her peers. At first we're impatient with how young it all is-must we be subjected to the unchallenging observations of a freshman who believes boys have an easier time being happy than girls?-but soon enough we're charmed by her trials. Intimidated by people with august middle names, lacking the "animal intuition" of her mates to play Madonna with the speakers facing out toward the courtyard-to be, in a word, cool-she suffers a loneliness that's almost magical: She believes that if her woe is intense enough, it will "magnetically draw a handsome boy to her room to comfort [her]." Of course, what comforts us is our understanding that her sense of inadequacy bodes well for her future-that it's a gift which will someday lead her to write the hard-won book we hold in our hands.

But not yet. First Lee has to work her way through that peculiar mix of distrust and disorientation that is the teenage outcast's lot. Rarely has the purgatory of prep-school privilege been spelled out in such excruciating, subtle detail. Because she lacks the most cherished of high-school attributes-the instinct to be breezy-Lee constantly questions her place in the world. She learns that fitting in is a more complicated matter than merely laughing at jokes she doesn't find funny ("it was an act of aggression not to"). Like an iceberg, 90 percent of her thought process is not visible to outsiders; unlike an iceberg, she's surprisingly warm to the touch.

Which brings us to boys. Ah, boys. It goes without saying that Lee is so clueless about the opposition-teenage boys who seem predatory one minute and tender the next-that she longs for the humblest sign of acceptance, even if it's only the "almost compliment" of having a guy call her by her last name. By her lights, she excels only at falling short, in algebra as in her love life, so that the very idea of sex leaves her "almost terrified, with hope."

All the better, then, when sex of a sort arrives and is subjected to the same rigorous examination as everything else. Her first kiss "was harder work than I had imagined, and less immediately pleasing. In fact, it felt intriguing more than enjoyable-the shifting, overlapping wet and dry parts of our mouths and faces, the mild sourness of his mouth … and also the way it was hard not to be conscious of the moment as it happened, not to want to pause and acknowledge it, even if only by laughing. I didn't find kissing funny, but it didn't seem that serious, either, not as serious as we were acting like it was."

Fast-forward to a blowjob. (Well, she does.) Surely Lee isn't the first preppie to suggest that the discomfort of giving one confers "a sort of nobility-a kinship with all the girls who'd done this before." But she may be the first to admit to "an affection for myself for being willing to do it." It's one of the reasons we come to be so fond of Lee and, by extension, Ms. Sittenfeld.

(Have I been getting the two mixed up? Blame the publisher, who made the questionable decision to send out press materials that feature photos of Ms. Sittenfeld's real-life Groton School junior class, and even of her heartthrob-presumably the recipient of her oral largesse.)

Throughout Prep, everyday schoolgirl angst gets a makeover from the setting: The stained-glass windows of chapel lend a "tinge of nobility and glamour to even the most pedestrian kind of homesickness." And compassion works its soft-touch magic: To win favor, Lee rather pathetically gives her classmates complimentary haircuts and finds herself acutely conscious of how "warm and vulnerable" their oblivious heads feel; she struggles all through the novel to feel for them a "true and continuous sympathy instead of mere intermittent pangs." So it's with regret that we wonder why Ms. Sittenfeld ultimately allows her narrator to buy into the snobbery that torments her, first by cruelly giving a potential suitor the back of her hand simply because he is "LMC" (lower middle class-part of the kitchen staff), and finally by learning to regard everyone back in South Bend with disdain (they "were fat, or wore brown ties, or seemed to be in bad moods)." Are we supposed to cheer when she's at last achieved this level of priggishness?

In the end, Lee is liberated by graduation and the realization that the pond is a lot bigger than it's been for the past four years. But she's sad, too-and so are we. Perhaps it's the knowledge that the pond is not all that much bigger, that life in the wide world is in many ways prep school writ large, and that she'll need every one of the protective talents she's honed-not just for the near future, but for the rest of her life, as well. In which case, may I be permitted an upperclassmen's well-meaning word of advice? Keep the gimlet eye, kiddo, but lose the snobbery. With heart and talent like yours, it's beneath you.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

The secret to Annie Proulx's latest collection of down-home Wyoming stories is hidden in plain sight: "In Elk Tooth everyone tries to be a character and with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against civilized society's pull."

She's being modest, but to a certain extent she's right: There isn't that much more to it than being gap-toothedly picturesque. Grandmothers with names like Vivian Stifle care more for their chickens than their children. Over-the-hill cowhands sport barbed wire as hat bands in their Stetsons. Young and old alike who make it a point of pride "to quit whenever and whatever needs quitting" are forever tripping on the belts of their bathrobes and cracking their heads on rickety cellar steps. With this kind of colorful ambiance, who needs to build character?

It may sound ungrateful to say, but so much gunsmoke-and-mirrors atmosphere seems to have made Ms. Proulx a tad lazy in Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. With all this sure-fire surface entertainment ripe for the picking, she may figure, why spoil the fun by delving for depth?

Certainly there's loads of fun to be had. Ms. Proulx has a genius for faces: One is "like an arrowhead, eyes so pale a blue they looked turned inside out, and atop his lip a drizzly mustache"; another "contained enough material for two faces: a high brow, a long chin, wide cheekbones with fleshy cheeks like vehicle head-rests, and a nose like a plowshare." Lest you think it's only women she picks on, one rancher is "a thready blond in his forties with a round head and beaky orange nose that gave him the look of a seagull," while another has "coarse skin [that] seemed made of old leather upholstery, and instead of lips, a small seam opened and disclosed his cement-colored teeth."

Ms. Proulx also has a bone-deep gift for landscape, profoundly loving Wyoming with its "long sight lines and rearing mountains," which "crouched at every horizon like dark sleeping animals, their backs whitened by snow …. Distance reduced a herd of cattle to a handful of tossed cloves." It's a backdrop she knows expertly: Mending a fence, one cowhand has to "cast about for a stick or something to twist tight a diagonal cross-brace wire, but the only thing at hand was a cow's bleached leg bone with its useful trochlea head, which seemed made to jam fence wire tight." She's able to render it with a sure hand (one range is "so badly gnawed it resembled the surface of an antique billiard table in an attic heavily populated by moths") and a warmth contagious enough that we can smell it: the mud and the "mineral odor of wet rock."

She even has a theme with heft-namely the collision between the Old West and New. Scattered like flecks of gold throughout Bad Dirt are terse, antique natives who mourn the old Wyoming that existed before ranchers started wearing aftershave, before rivers were "faced with flattened junk cars to prevent erosion in the spring floods," before the gated clusters of 4,200-square-foot "timber castles" sprang up, featuring "a gargantuan living room, intricate log notches, the distant mountains fitted artfully into the vast window, against which birds broke their heads." These cowpoke McMansions are inhabited by jet-setters capable of appreciating the local pronghorn only insofar as "their coloration-reddish brown accented by sparkling white-reminded him of a pair of golf shoes he had once owned."

Wonderful, right? "At dusk a globe of light like an incandescent jellyfish … stained the mountainy darkness the weak orange of civilization." At dawn the security policemen patrolling the millionaire subdivisions practice making loon calls, now that the real loons have all disappeared. The local ranchers know something's wrong with their fat, sweaty children but can't say what, choosing instead to blame their unquenchable thirst on the over-salted chicken sold at fast-food joints. With laconic poetry, Ms. Proulx says they can no longer "tell the size of things." Gene Autry country it ain't, and probably never was: Between the droughts of yore and the Wal-Marts of today, Wyoming's marrow has been pretty much sucked dry … but it's meat for a writer like Mr. Proulx to sink her teeth into-especially when the truck stops sell lemon meringue that tastes like tartar sauce with sugar.

More's the pity, then, that Ms. Proulx allows herself to trivialize her own material. She takes too facile a pleasure in giving her characters cartoonish handles like Plato Bucklew, Ulysses Straw Bird, Fran Banghammer, Mercedes de Silhouette, Doctor Playfire and worse. I blush to report that a Reverend Pecker is referred to as "Reverend Pottymouth." The western twang is frequently of the hee-haw, clod-kicking variety that belies the author's high purpose (and belies as well her slightly forbidding, arms-crossed, high-school-wrassler-style author photo). Even granting the tradition of varmint-rustling Rockies vernacular, she takes too little care enlisting imagery that shoots for anything beyond the cheap laugh. (One cashier "disliked having to repeat 'Have a nice day' to people who deserved to be ridden bareback by the devil wearing can openers for spurs.")

Worse, most of these aren't tales so much as tidbits. Stories as slight and harmless as "The Trickle Down Effect" (which first appeared in The New Yorker) about a "good horsewoman" named Fiesta Punch who hires a drunk to haul hay from Wisconsin ("Westconston!") are little more than the sort of inspired drunkalogues you might hear at an A.A. meeting. A silly throwaway about a beard-growing contest (first published in The Virginia Quarterly Review) has the feel of something wisely left out of her first Wyoming collection five years ago. One (first published in Playboy), even has a caveat emptor tucked into its opening paragraph: "It's not much of a story, the kind of thing you might hear on a sluggish afternoon in Pee Wee's." But what if we readers don't want to waste the afternoon at the local saloon? What if we rely on the fiction editors of The New Yorker, Playboy, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Scribner to separate the wheat from the chaff for us, and not let Ms. Proulx coast on her hard-won reputation for penetrating, pitch-perfect fictions?

Though studded with genuine delights (and one fully realized story, "The Wamsutter Wolf," which restores our faith in editors: The Paris Review knew what fierce, frightening hilarity Ms. Proulx is capable of when she marinates a story long enough), most of these 11 pieces are patently stories in a minor key, little more than five-finger exercises. I'm reminded of what another truculent-appearing, arms-crossed author once had a character say about his own writing. In a story-within-a-story that Garp tossed off in The World According to Garp, John Irving had Garp acknowledge that he could have written it "with one hand tied behind his back." It's a testament to Ms. Proulx's prodigious talent elsewhere that we're forced to say the same thing here.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Does anyone know if the word "coquette" was in vogue in Canada in the 1940's? Because if it was, you can be sure that the gravely gifted and always interesting short-story writer Alice Munro, born in rural Ontario in 1931, didn't get through high school without hearing a lot of it aimed in her direction.

Or maybe not. Maybe she was one of those teens who funneled all her energy into the track team, or the literary magazine, steering clear of those classmates who indulged in the immemorial practice of leading suitors on. In either case, I mean no disrespect to the grand dame of New Yorker contributors; let me hasten to add (or not so hasteningly-let me say it leisurely, loiteringly, taking my sweet coquettish time), that I intend the term in the most flattering sense. A literary coquette, let us stipulate, is someone who-like Ms. Munro in her worthy but rather hysterically overpraised latest collection, Runaway-piques our interest early, backtracks to fill out the context, ambles around the edges of our patience, holds all in abeyance while tension mounts, and delivers the goods at a time and place of her own choosing, if at all.

So what is the literary coquette's M.O.? Typically, she (or he) specializes in a mouth-watering come-on-certain car passengers, say, are driving around in their pajamas at midnight-about which she tells us nothing more for many pages. The characters-sometimes as many as three or four in the opening paragraphs-all know more than the reader and won't let on while the story ambles along, dilating tantalizingly and only gradually looping back to take care (or not) of our desperate narrative needs.

The technique is deliberate, reliable and (God knows) time-tested. Some of the world's favorite literary coquettes-Stephen King being perhaps the crudest and most transparently manipulative-compute their suspense by degrees in order to leave us hanging. Unless we're prone to the literary equivalent of blue balls, hanging's not necessarily a bad thing, even if we admit that the impulse to write this way-to deny the reader vital information or a central secret-is essentially withholding when not downright passive-aggressive.

Ms. Munro holds back well. She opens one of the eight stories in this, her 11th collection, with a green-faced man near a tree "fruited with jewels"; not till we turn the page are we told we're inside a Chagall print. The starkly titled stories most often feature a solitary woman with something of a gypsy air (or at least a free-form country sensibility), likely to be traveling the Canadian countryside in search of someone's old summer house in a state of composed semi-bewilderment, fueled by nostalgia to which she will never quite surrender, half ruing the lost years, half comforted that they are gone. Oddly buoyed by "lack of hope-genuine, reasonable, and everlasting," she's also sustained by a sense of solidarity with other women, both "stricken with respect" for the older role models of her youth and assured that her sister-sufferers are the sterner sex: "Women have always got something, haven't they, to keep them going? That men haven't got."

Strict with herself, as befits the class tease, she is brave and stoical, even when her beloved daughter (in the devastating story "Silence") runs off to a spiritual retreat and, year after agonizing year, opts not to return. Stiffened by inner resources, she appears in one story (perhaps standing in for the strong-jawed and frumpy-hatted Ms. Munro herself?) as "beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner ... was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles."

Often lapsing into reminiscence, these splendid women-just beyond our fingertips!-are burdened by a sense of propriety so old-fashioned that one of them is reluctant to call a young doctor by his first name, while another declines to use the word "breast" to describe where Cleopatra's asp mortally bit her. Somewhat stunted by the limitations of their time and place ("She gags on the word spirituality, which seems to take in … everything from prayer wheels to High Mass"), most are concerned with nothing more earth-shaking than the business of marriage proposals-who is egging on whom, who gets turned down for the third time and who is marked for spinsterhood. (In this regard, it may be of interest to note that "Some of the best-looking, best-turned-out women in town are those who did not marry.")

All these details are delivered in the manner of a prom queen of yore dispensing her favors to the football captain while she hums the school anthem-dispassionately, almost with a sense of disavowal. "She recalled now how the sun was coming up behind them, how she looked at Clark's hands on the wheel, the dark hairs on his competent forearms, and breathed in the smell of the inside of the truck, a smell of oil and metal, tools and horse barns. The cold air of the fall morning blew in through the truck's rusted seams." And then, of course, there's the chasteness of the act itself: "The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming." Of actual congress, nary a word.

So what's it like for a coquette to be teased herself? Ms. Munro's characters seem to thrive on it, whether they're pining for an estranged daughter's return, in one story, or counting the days that separate them from a potential lover, in another. (Ardently touching her fingers to the name of her beloved's hometown on a map, "she might have touched the very place he was in" and becomes aware "of a shine on herself, on her body, on her voice and all her doings," making her "walk differently and smile for no reason." The yearning gives purpose to her existence, filling her with "tension and defiance, the risk of her life.") And when the unspeakable occurs-when word comes down that the daughter has produced five grandchildren that the mother has no hope of meeting, or when the man seems to turn his lover away without a word of explanation-their corseted natures do them proud: Ms. Munro's characters won't let themselves go. Women in Runaway are given to weeping offstage; afterward, we see only their reddened eyes.

In the end, her sufferance bequeaths Ms. Munro the long view, the ability to witness and anticipate how small towns change over time, how old houses heave and give up the ghost, how families morph and vengeances are wreaked and love sparks anew, sometimes from the very ashes that seemed to cool decades earlier. Call it the wisdom of the literary coquette. One after the other, these stories, saturated with grieving insight, leave us "outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame"-with endings that are as satisfyingly appropriate as they are goose-bumpingly unforgettable. And that's a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

She looked as though a puppy had done something nasty on the blue-and-gold-squiggled carpet of the Marriott Marquis. "I'm not answering questions like that!" she snarled.

Maybe the courageous anti-censorship crusader didn't want to be reminded that it's been 34 years since her classic Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret was first published, though she seems to have held up remarkably well, considering it was some 75 million copies and 20 translations ago. "I'm here to give a speech!" she elaborated.

Struggling to make the most of her non sequitur, The Observer rallied by asking if she had her speech memorized. " No!" she declared stonily, apparently judging that the sixth-floor carpet had been soiled again. "It's long!" Relenting at last, she made a visible decision to crank up the charm. "Don't worry," she said, batting her lashes and nearly flouncing with insincerity, "when it's done, you'll know everything you've ever wanted to know about Judy Blume … and more!"

Other than that, the 55th National Book Awards ceremony was a hearty hoe-down. Divided between the tuxed and the non-tuxed (a.k.a. publishing mavens and the workaday press, loading up on polenta hors d'oeuvres before being relegated to the crispy tuna-fish gallery upstairs), the pre-banquet session featured the Five Unknowns-the relatively unsung New York women controversially nominated for the fiction award over the likes of Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe (none of whom were in attendance. Were they miffed? Wouldn't you be?).

To a man, the nominees' spouses were stalwartly supportive. "Our 5-year-old doesn't consider it controversial," said Rafael Pelli, the husband of Kate Walbert (destined not to win for Our Kind: A Novel in Stories). Equally admiring was Mike Fleming, the husband of party organizer Meg Kearney, who as head volunteer was charged with laying out nominated books on all the banquet tables for guests to take home. What was it like being the husband of the boss? "Very easy-she's extraordinarily organized," he said. Even daughters got in on the synergy thing: Rebecca Chace, the daughter of poet Jean Valentine (who was to win for Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003), was effusively proud. "To us, she was never just 'Mom,'" said the blond dazzler.

Elsewhere, a famous wen went whizzing by on the face of Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, which produced The 9/11 Commission Report (due to be disappointed later in the evening when the nonfiction award went to Kevin Boyle for his Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age.) An entire table of moribund government-type wonks left early after that one; were they miffed?

At the bar, no one seemed particularly sedated by the absence of Roth, Wolfe and Co., though a stately woman with a flowered glass brooch did allow that she hadn't spotted any of her fellow board members anywhere. "Maybe they didn't show because they'd be stoned," said her companion.

Adjourning to the $1,000-a-seat banquet hall for the main event, Garrison Keillor did a workmanlike job as M.C., in his bemused singsong manner. (How come mock-weary works so well for some, so dismally for others?) Executive director Harold Augenbraum professed to be pleased that this newspaper had called him a "bad-ass"-he promised he would milk the phrase for all it was worth to impress his small sons. Rick Moody, in a tie that could only be called polka-dotted, eloquently defended his committee's choice of the Five Unknowns by saying they were on the hunt "for excellence, and nothing else," defined as that "which adheres in language and in imagination" and "extends the life of the American tongue." Mr. Moody done good.

When it was time for the winners to be announced, it was evident at once that Oscar needn't fear that the National Book Foundation was going to steal his glitz anytime soon. Apparently, the notion of glamour held by bookworms is of a different category altogether from the one held by screen actors. Shortly after each name was delivered, a feeble huzzah went up from some dim corner, everyone looked about in strobe-lit confusion, and at length the award winners stumbled forth (sometimes literally, though it would be cruel to name names) to claim their bronze statue, blinking as though unearthed from beneath a rock. For pizzazz, a half-hearted attempt at music occasionally warbled on, though you could be forgiven if you thought it was emanating from someone's late-night bar mitzvah down the hall.

As is customary, certain revealing truths were unveiled from the podium. Pete Hautman, the author of Godless, the young people's winner about teens worshipping a water tower, said: "I would give anything if I could be 11 years old again, reading Lord of the Rings." Lily Tuck, author of the fiction winner The News from Paraguay, confessed, "I have never been to Paraguay, nor do I intend to go." But all of this paled in comparison to the revelations delivered during Ms. Blume's turn.

One of the things The Observer likes best about sitting with the press is that we're not supposed to take part in standing ovations when everyone else does. Even clapping is suspicious, like we're compromising our precious objectivity. So The Observer did neither when Ms. Blume took the stage to receive her lifetime-achievement medal (the one that caused such a dust-up when Stephen King got it last year).

Evidently, Ms. Blume is one of those people who waxes warmer at a distance, dropping only a few names, admitting that she had eczema as a child and that she suffered "emptiness" when her own children were young, revealing that she cried in the closet when she got her first rejection, before she came to the Solomonic realization that "rejection hurts but doesn't kill you." She didn't even lose points when she bragged that she is "more connected to Philip Roth than he will ever know" (she claimed their mothers went to high school together in Elizabeth, N.J.). The beloved author had a stage presence that was belovable.

But still, you could tell. After thanking an 11-year-old for her fine reading of a passage from Margaret, she didn't stop to let the applause build, but barreled on to talk about how speechless the award left her, as well as to choke back tears that seemed, from The Observer's vantage, distinctly crocodilian. And was she being sarcastic when she thanked her husband of 25 years, George Cooper, with a dedication that she had to know sounded like an inscription from a junior high-school yearbook? ("I love you, you're perfect, don't ever change!") But then again, we weren't objective. We'd been snarled at.

The take-home lesson? Never talk to an aging children's-book author about aging, especially before she delivers a speech that she hasn't memorized. Oh, and one other thing: Apparently, books on the Shoah sell even worse in 2004 than they used to. After the ceremony was over and everyone had hit the many escalators home, almost half the banquet tables still had a copy of one worthy book left, mid the empty coffee cups and crumpled napkins. Its title? Shoah Train. Holocaust marketers, take note: They couldn't give 'em away.